Rand Fishkin: If I Could Go Back to 1991 and Get Any Name, I Would Grab Porn.com

NEW YORK – Rand Fiskin, the original founder of Moz.com, has gone out on his own new venture called “Spark Toro”, using the domain name, SparkToro.com. Lucky him, he’s fairly accurate when he said it is a decent name you can easily remember, proven to me by the fact that I did not need to go look it up (again); I did in fact remember it a day later as I write this article, but in full disclosure, I typed it in Google’s search box yesterday while watching the video and I briefly visited the site, to check it out, so that probably helped me remember it today, however, I’m still not sure of what exactly he does at the new company besides run the outfit. (Spark Toro doesn’t tell me much on the surface, but I would have to guess, with his background, it is something about marketing).

Anyway, Rand is an SEO professional and master-marketer, widely known throughout the SEO community for being able to clearly articulate and educate webmasters on what exactly is going on with Google (at any given time) and how to get yourself to the top of search engines, through a multitude of methods, including general marketing, link building tactics, social media, and even some old-school marketing psychology.

Most of Rand’s ideas and methods I find extremely interesting and sensible, oftentimes even fascinating. I appreciate his advice and he has a huge following from his candor in the space, yet I did not get to watch as many of his Moz whiteboard sessions as I would have liked (was called whiteboard Friday), and I watch and read his newer ramblings even less; through years of reading, building, sharing, testing and learning I’ve become, for the most part, just too busy to tune into things like the old days.

But on June 4, the DomainSherpa newsletter hit my inbox as it featured an interview with Rand on the Domain Sherpa Show, which is now owned and operated by Andrew Rosener’s Media Options, and hosted and moderated by Tess Diaz, who does a fantastic job, being that she has very – very large shoes to fill now that DNAcademy Founder, Michael Cyger has moved on. I was lucky enough to be on my own Sherpa show in 2016 roughly a year after I took over LongIsland.com.

This show was called “Understanding Domains As SEO & Marketing Tools – with Rand Fishkin” and it sat in my inbox for a week until I could finally get to it yesterday (I had refused to delete it from my inbox all week as that often acts as my to-do-list and once something is removed from my inbox it near-never gets done). I rarely get to watch the Domain Sherpa shows and in fact, this was the first Sherpa Video I took the near hour-and-a-half to tune into since the platform changed ownership, but this one I really didn’t want to miss.

Reason being, Rand is one of very few people who I believe really – really understands Google inside and out.

The newsletter detailed the discussion would included thoughts on “EMDs and SEO today, SEO for new gTLDs, how to deal with blacklists or shadow banning, and how voice and mobile search may affect domain name values.” – very good topics to be in-the-know on.

Rand is an expert at SEO and will tell you what he really thinks is going on. For instance, at one point in the video he simply admitted that he doesn’t necessarily believe or trust Google when they report on some of the ways they calculate and return their search results, that they lie… I wholeheartedly agree.

I actually think that’s one of the main reasons Google’s old Webmaster PR Junkie, Matt Cutts disappeared from view a few years ago; he just couldn’t stomach it anymore. All the nonsense told to webmasters and all the blow-back at times of major shake-ups in search and things they have reported on not making sense or causing havoc through the industry, ruining people’s businesses –  Cutts was always left holding the bag and to clean it all up. Keep in mind he started at Google when their motto really was “Don’t be evil“ – So he moved on to other things and is now with the United States Digital Service, a high level governmental technology position close the President of the United States.

This Particular Sherpa Show

One of the most important reasons I personally wanted to watch this particular video was to see what Rand’s thoughts were about “Exact Match Domains”, EMDs, a hotly debated issue which largely effects the value of great keyword rich domain names since they tend to rank better and faster in search engines and thus command generally much higher sales prices – at least that’s what people believe and that’s what is being discussed on the show, not to mention some other mildly related items including new gTLDs [psst, he doesn’t like them much because as he says it, he is in the business “for the long haul”, not some temporary buzz]. (Related: Greatest Benefits of New gTLDs is PR, Temporary “Buzz Factor” “Link Equity”)

For the first time I can remember, I didn’t follow along much with what Rand said about EMDs.

Rand seemed to avoid the benefits of exact match domains and went on about the marketing value of “brandables” – relatively unknown words and short groups of letters that a business can build an entire brand around, and he spent quite some time going over why a business might want to become a brand of its own, rather than relying on something people can immediately read and rank for. He spent a lot of time on this and seemed to circle back to it quite a bit, elaborating on advanced marketing abilities and the importance of building your own real brand.

So what’s the problem with all of that?

The problem with this is that most people who start out on the Internet do not have the kind of capital available to begin the process of building a true brand. This takes, often times, hundreds of thousands of dollars to accomplish, to even a relatively successful degree, and most people simply do not have this cash available. It also takes years to do effectively and if most businesses do not find a reasonable level of success in the short-term, they often won’t make it to the final stages.

What Rand is not taking into consideration with these thoughts, at least in my opinion, is that as an outstanding marketer himself, if an exact match domain could help someone “relatively new” to an industry break-through the noise and rank better in search engines, that’s serious leverage for a start-up. Good search engine rankings work to build your brand right there in search, where most people find the things they need and immense new customer acquisition is obtained. You can indeed build a brand from this.

If you do not have the time and cash to build yourself a nice flashy brand of your own, you’re risking never getting off the ground to begin with, and could find yourself out of business before you’ve really begun to get started – especially nowadays. Marketing something from scratch on the Internet has become extremely difficult, and the average, again, we’re talking about the average new business startup, is facing a myriad of difficulties and road blocks, most of which us old-school Internet marketers did not face when we started out. (Related: If I Had Just Started With Domain Names Today, I Don’t Think I Would Make It).

So this – in a nutshell – is what I did not agree with this time around when it comes to Rand’s advice. It’s about leverage to get you started. I personally won’t even start an online business without some sort of serious and immediate leverage in my market, and for the most part that always starts out with a great – no – superb domain name, one which easily and quickly explains the purpose of my site right there in the web address, right there in the search result. Especially something that is going to help me get found, as easily as possible, and one which will help people type my website address correctly [very important].

One example which came up during the show was an example such as “KitchenCabinets.com” which is a good domain name that immediately tells someone what the website would be about and would even help the site rank in search engines for the keywords, “Kitchen Cabinets” (this is what should have been being debated – what’s changed with this) – plus, when people link to a site like that, that’ll also build links to the site with the product name in the anchor text, more leverage gravy to through on top.

There was a second example of “RareItalianCollectorsBooks.com” – but if I were moderating the discussion, I would have stopped that thought and suggested not talking about four-word long tail domains which are hard to type and look terrible. I would have suggested short two word domains, three words tops, that don’t look like su·per·ca·li·fra·gil·is·tic·ex·pi·a·li·do·cious.

In Rand’s example he sort of avoided the fact that the first example domain “KitchenCabinets.com” would in fact rank better, and that is what most people were likely focusing in on for this discussion with an SEO expert like Rand, at least that is what I wanted to hear more about. A serious and relatively short category killer – is it better than some unrelated word or phrase you’ve made up on your own. Rather than building a brand around a nonsensical web name, the question should be, or should have been, will an exact match domain help you rank better in search engines or if this a thing of the past with all of Google’s recent algorithmic changes. That’s what most ‘domainers’ are likely interested to hear from an SEO expert like Fishkin.

So I feel the discussion veered-off-coerce a tad, and should have focused in a bit more on how Google has lightened up some on this over time, yet detail the remaining benefits after most of this dust has settled. So again, I’m pretty sure this question was intended to answer less on brand-value and more on the SEO fundamentals of an exact match domain. For instance: Is it worth it to spend thousands for a great domain rather than grabbing a four-five word reg fee starter name?

If you’re wondering what I think on the issue, I think keywords in your domain still help out tremendously, it’s just not the be-all end-all it used to be. As Google has fine-tuned its ability to focus in on more user based metrics as well as other things such as social signals, etc, it lessens the amount Google needs to rely on the keywords in the name, but they still play a critical roll for a multitude of reasons.

In any business buildup, you have to crawl before you can walk and then run. Being seen as the “Kitchen Cabinet” giant in the industry with your own cool branded name, in my opinion, is better left to be tackled after you have obtained some moderate success in your field – at least to some extent, or you could find yourself building a neat cool looking brand accompanied by no sales revenues.

With that said, I did tend to agree with most of his overall marketing points, including some physiological ones about brands and product recognition – some of which are likely in his new book he was discussing during the show called Lost and Founder [cool name].

I also agreed that if turning back time to 1991 purchasing the domain name Porn.com, would likely have been a huge success, at least financially, as he mentioned it is within the most lucrative industry in the online world ($90+ billion growing each year according to Forbes) which Rosener then pointed out, although it was a private sale, Porno.com sold for $8,888,888, [by Rick Schwartz back in 2015] so the shorter and more commonly used version was likely sold or at least worth, somewhere in the eight-figure zone.

John Colascione

About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of Internet Marketing Services Inc. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a ‘how to’ book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several Internet related businesses through his search engine strategy brand Searchen Networks®