Scott Savage's Blog » SEO

What happens when a domain name expires?

Scott — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 06:31:33 +0000

Recently I noticed that the scottsavage.com domain name was not being actively used and was about to expire. Having historically been on scottsavage.net, I thought this would be a great opportunity to quickly grab it. It turns out the process takes a very long time, giving the current owner plenty of time to renew their registration. I found this chart to be the best explanation of what happens during the process:

Flow chart of the Domain Expiry Process

As you can see it takes almost 3 months from when a domain expires to when it is finally available for public re-registration by a different owner. You can track the progress of a domain name towards expiry by using a whois tool.

Once it is available you can register it through any domain name reseller, or if you are really keen (like I was) you can use a domain name backorder tool which will automatically buy the domain name as soon after it ‘drops’ as it can. I have used the Godaddy domain backorder tool twice, and have been successful twice so I strongly recommend it. I still think however that the biggest risk is the current registrant renewing some time before the final deletion phase, which of course is unfortunately completely out of your control.

So as you might have guessed, as of this week I have secured scottsavage.com! It expired on the 24th of March, so that illustrates just how slow the process is. The next question is whether I migrate my blog to that domain or not, and what effect this will have on my SEO… hmmm… too scared to do this until I do some more research…

WordPress URL Rewriting in IIS

Scott — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:09:11 +0000

If you host WordPress on an IIS Server then there is only one choice for URL rewriting, the Binary Fortress WordPress URL Rewriting tool. I have been using it for about 6 months now, but a shiny new v1.0 was released about a month ago. Time to upgrade I think!

URL Rewriting is one of the more critical parts of my attempts at SEO. There are a number of pages that discuss in more detail the benefits of clean links.

People employed to improve SEO have one of the truly great IT jobs I think. There is enough science to provide credibility, it is enough of a black art to avoid direct accountability and the target is constantly moving meaning your contract/role never looks like it has expired. Wow I really am feeling cynical tonight…

Yahoo Pipes and SEO

Scott — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 03:45:04 +0000

I was reading Seth Yate’s blog yesterday and noticed a few tweaks. One of them was the sidebar with a whole list of interesting bits of news and posts from other websites. This is a great way to boost your PageRank, seeing as Google loves you linking related content together. I started clicking a few links to find out how he actually pulled all the data together, and this is when I clicked “Recently Shared” and stumbled across his Pipe (you will need a Yahoo account to see it).

The basic idea of Yahoo Pipes is to pull together and mash up content. I would really suggest having a read of this guide to get a basic understanding of some of the possibilities. I have implemented it down the left hand column of this site, albeit after running the feed through Feedburner so I can assess it’s effectiveness.

The next step is to include the User Input element. I could pass the titles of my blog post into Pipes, which then searches Digg or some other blog indexer and gets the most relevant (and popular) articles? Who needs to add quality links into your blog posts when a well tweaked Pipe can do it for you?