DomainTools Blog

With less than a month to go, the team at Domain Roundtable is getting ready to host our most exciting line-up to date!

First, let’s talk money - and ways to save!

Save on your conference passes! DomainTools Silver and Gold members receive a discount. Just log into your account and get your discount code. Or, take advantage of our Domain Roundtable survey! Your vote counts in our Name Intelligence Awards. Be heard as we span the industry, looking to see who is the best of the best. Cast your ballot for your favorites, including Best Registrar, Best Forum, Best Industry Media Coverage, Best Blog Community, and Best Parking Company. The best part, though, is receiving $50 off your DRT conference pass as a thank you for your input.

Save on your hotel! We also have discount rates still available for rooms at our host location, The Palace Hotel. However, they are going quickly. The rate is guaranteed until April 1, on a first come first serve basis. Visit our web site for your to reserve your space TODAY! www.domainroundtable.com/2008/venue

Save on your airfare! We’ve had many attendees let us know that they are getting great airfares right now to San Francisco. Check out your favorite airfare shopping site!

Now, updates on what is happening at the conference.

As mentioned in previous posts, we’re shining a spotlight into the future of the industry with a host of speakers offering real expert advice on building manageable and profitable domain portfolios. We at DRT are glad to bring so many great panelists into the Roundtable this year. Here are some highlights:

• We are also happy to announce the return of our CEO Roundtable! Building on the foundation of the panel’s previous success, our team of CEOs will highlight recent trends in American and global economics. Hear the heads in the industry discuss how these trends affect us and get a first-hand prognosis from industry-leading companies on what you can do to increase during economic challenges.
• Matt Cutts, our Google insider, is still accepting your most challenging questions about SEO and Google. Take part in this intimate discussion by submitting your questions to our guest webmaster at: mattcutts [at] domainroundtable.com.
• Get information on alternative monetization opportunities brought to you by DomainStrategies, EVOLanding, Mpire and more!
• Sunday, April 20, see the .ME induction into the ccTLD space. .ME, however, is all about you, and so GoDaddy, the .ME initiator, and DRT invite everyone to take part in this exclusive lunch-time launch. Be there to get all the details and celebrate the sunrise of .ME. Get an insider head start.
• Our array of top domainers, parking experts, and SEO moguls, who bring years of experience and insider tips will discuss all avenues of industry.

Don’t forget the Gamble for Good party for Grassroots.org sponsored by TrafficZ. This casino night fundraiser is bound to be a success — after all, it is a TrafficZ party! There are great prizes being awarded throughout the evening. Plus, music by DJ Matteo, go-go dancers, food and cocktails! Play for a good cause, prizes and bragging rights! Check it all out and register early at the gambleforgood.org.

Plus, the DomainTools Live Auction is on! The team is working daily to put together the list of domains to auction. Stay tuned on that. But, remember that, as an attendee, you get one guaranteed admission into our Live Auction. You can find more information here in the auction section at www.domainroundtable.com/2008/auction.

The countdown is on! We’ll see you there!

For more details on the agenda, our sponsors and location, please visit: www.DomainRoundtable.com/.

Who owns one word generic domains? The easy answer is, Domainers. It was very cool to find that Matt Cutts of Google owns three domain names and one of them is a generic word. Dullest.com is a name Matt found one day looking through the deleting domain lists back in 2003, when he saw a one word generic domain drop he registered the domain pretty easily, there was no automated army back then snapping up every dropped domain. I estimate that the domain is worth about $3,000. Had Matt worked harder at picking up domains he may not need his day job.

So what is Matt doing with Dullest.com?
He has placed a robots.txt file on the server that blocks all search engine robots from crawling his site. The one word website that says, “Arouw.”, I have not figured out what that word means. It is not french, so I think it is a fictional word. Is Google testing to see where that made up word gets copied too?

Matt’s most famous domains.
MattCutts.com is the most famous domain that Matt owns, he started a blog that talks about his experiences and sometimes things he is doing at Google. He is an unofficial spokesperson for Google because he understands the engine under the hood and knows how to speak in public. He also worked at the Department of Defense while in college and had Top Secret clearance which demonstrates he knows how to keep a secret. Matt started blogging so that he could see the same issues that webmasters had. He became a webmaster so that he could walk in their shoes.

The third domain.
Matt tracks down a lot of dirty SEO people. So I think he registered ShadySEO.com because he wants to secretly be one. It is that or perhaps he will publishing a list one day with all the SEOs that he has taken down and dumped out of Google index. Or perhaps “Shady SEO” will be the name of the book he writes one day. Registering a concept or idea years before you do something with it is required now days. I guess we will wait and see what he does with the domain.

What domain should Matt get next?
I think Matt should park a domain name. He would experience what domainers experience. Matt has stated that he will not run Google Adsense because it is a conflict of Interest. He thought about running Yahoo’s ads but I haven’t seen any on his website. I think he would be ok running a parking page that was powered by Yahoo. I bet he would make a dollar a day just because he owns the domain and people would check it out. He Matt, why not park Dullest.com and get it banned. Then try pulling it out of of the bad and building a website on it. It would be an interesting experiment that would get you closer to what we experience and perhaps Google would change the way they do thing for the better because of your experiences.

I am at SMX Seattle this week and talking with a lot of Industry leading SEO webmasters about what is going on in the Search Engine space right now. There is increased talk about how ranking first is even more important now then ever before now that Google has launched Universal Search. I attended a few after parties held by Google, Yaho0, and Microsoft, all of them were great, but personally I think Google’s party was the best. The Google Colors were every where and they had full candy bars (see picture below). The glow in the dark dring glasses were a nice touch as well. If you would like to see notes from the session they had good coverage by some bloggers in the audience which got posted at SE Roundtable. No relation to the Domain Roundtable. I think Domainers and SEO Experts need to work closers together so I have invited some of the best experts to the Domain Roundtable for our August conference. I will talk about these experts later.

Here is a video from the Google party of flying Google User’s Search Queries. I suspect the queries are some how not live or very very heavily filtered. I noticed a few queries happening ever few minutes. I tried to upload this video to YouTube but it was rejected… Hmmm is that censorship? Well anyway just uploaded it to Blip.tv. (BTW, anyone know a truely free AVI to FLV converter?)

Click To Play

Later I ran into Matt Cutts from Google and he taught me some new gang symbols.