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The first 2 minutes of the interview Michael Kahn of Performics talks about the lost art of buying domain names for direct navigation traffic and to provide feeder traffic for branded sites.

Google announced that they are now showing site hierarchy in search results instead of the actual URL. The image above outlines the changes to the search engine results page. When the site hierarchy is displayed those are additional links to the website too. The official word from Google is below:

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

Now it’s even more important to structure your website with properly named breadcrumbs to achieve the best results in Google search.

Watching television the other night I saw Rubbermaid using EasyFindLids.com to promote their new product line of storage containers that feature lids that snap together and snap to the bottom of the container it fits. The domain name 302 redirects to their main site located here: http://www.rubbermaid.com/Category/Pages/Category.aspx?CatName=FoodStorage

Good to see yet another company understand that owning and marketing the domain name of their product name to the masses is much easier than trying to push consumers to a URL such as: Rubbermaid.com/EasyFindLids

Much like Arm & Hammer’s Spinbrush, Scrubbing Bubbles is marketing their Automatic Shower Cleaner product with the exact match domain name. Owning the product domain helps them own the space from all other automatic shower cleaners that exist now or the ones that may come out in the future from other manufacturers. This also puts them way ahead in search results too, they are #1 in Google, Yahoo and Bing for the search term.

Arm & Hammer is launching their new spinning toothbrush product named the Spinbrush and can be found at Spinbrush.com. The new product name and the matching domain is vital to Arm & Hammer branding their new product. Spinbrush is a trademarked term first registered in January 2001, the domain Spinbrush.com was first registered in January 2000 (not sure if they were the original registrant). Either way it’s glad to see they secured the product domain name.

When it comes to acquiring product domains from the aftermarket or hand registering the most common issue that arises is if you should get the singular or the plural (or both) of the product domain. It really comes down to what the product is, how it’s being purchased, the quantity it’s being sold as and the use of the domain.

For example DesignerJeans.com would always be plural, as a singular version doesn’t make sense. Singular product domains that would normally end in “es” as a plural, such as WineHutch.com or WineHutches.com tend to get significantly more search volume as the singular – some exceptions would be watches, lenses, etc. A product domain such as a BabyStroller.com would generally get more type-in traffic but BabyStrollers.com would make for a better e-commerce site, brands easier, and tell users that you sell more than one type of the product.

Feel free to share your thoughts/experiences in the comments below.