Natural Search &
Online Tourism Consultant

Google have now removed their Adsense reporting from Beta and as of this morning is available to link with UK Analaytics Accounts. After signing into Adsense you will be promoted to link your accounts. The top content report shows your most visited AdSense pages and how you’re monetizing them. For example, you can see what pages have the highest clickthrough rate (CTR) or highest eCPM.

Use Analytics’ detailed traffic analysis to gain insight into and improve your AdSense performance. they’ll break down performance in some new ways, showing earnings and ad impressions based on user visits, the top sites referring users to AdSense, and the geographical areas where your visitors are located.

If you are seeing very low bounce rates in your analytics packages especially Google Analytics the chances are there is a technical problem with your installation of the tracking code…usually double tagged pages. This has become an increasingly common issue since the introduction of the new tracking code released by Google over 12 months ago and the subsequent update. If you have the Firebug firefox plugin; click Inspect, Net and then tick all three boxes and you should be looking out for the __utm.gif image which is Google analytics calling home. If you see 2 instances of this you are likely to have double tagged your pages.

Google today announced the launch of Google Search options, a tool that will allow users to dig deeper into their search results for a more customizable search experience. The search options, available right on the results page, lets users sort and reshape results and explore their queries to quickly and more easily find what they need.

Search options will allow users to break out their results in several ways, including:

• Show only pages with a certain type of content. Limit search results to see only videos, forums or reviews for a given search. For searches about films or novels, you’ll now be able easily to search for reviews; or you can view only pages that contain videos in them.
• View related searches. With this tool you can view a list of related searches or have them graphically represented using the Wonder Wheel feature.
• Organize by date. Find the most recent results, by limiting your results to pages from the past 24 hours, past week or past year.

Search options might be particularly helpful for searches that are hard to express with keywords (such as “Show me discussions about ‘the Oscars’ in forums”) or when you want to explore topics more broadly or refine them (for example, “Show me queries that typically branch out from ‘Renewable Energy’”).

Be sure to try out the Wonder Wheel great for finding related keywords!

Search options is a further way to give users the power to customize the way the use Google,” said Juergen Galler, Director of Product Management at Google. “We’re always thinking about what we can do to improve the search experience, and we think this launch is a good step to help users get quickly and easily to precisely the kind of information they seek.”

Here are some top tips for inclusion in your domain dispute resolution case

1. If you have a trademark; search for it and quote the URL from the intellectual property office
2. Note the date that they registered the domain name from the whois on the Nominet.org.uk  website
3. Check the way back machine and understand what the domain was used for in the time that the current registrant owned it. Often you can see that on a accidentally dropped domain name, the new registrant immediatly puts the domain on an domain auction website. In a recent case the registrant put the domain on a domain auction site within 12hours of acquiring it which coincidentally was picked up by the way back machine therefore adding ammunition that the registrant had no intention of doing anything with the domain.
4. Take screen shots of the domain in its current state, if the domain has paid adverts from your competitors or clients this is great ammunition for your case as the regisitrant is trying to palm off their domain as your own.
5. If the domain name is for sale with a domain sales site like Sedo you can find visitor number from their domain listing page. Another useful statistic to include as squatters will often not realise this metric is publically available and would otherwise be impossible to get.
6. If the brand is registered in a personal name or UK registered business they are very unlikely to want their details broadcast if the case gets referred to an “Expert” because the case becomes publicly available. Some high profile squatters not naming any names have a truly tarnished online reputation due to the DRS process going to an experts decision on many occasions, you might want to highlight this to them in the initial correspondence.

The goal at this stage is to cover every angle and not give the registrant anywhere to move, if they are new to the DRS this is usually enough to bring on the sweats.

Nominet have launched a new search function for expert decisions from the Dispute Resolution Service. For the first time, it is now possible to search through the text of published decisions using a free-text search or more specific search criteria.

The Dispute Resolution Service (DRS) offers an efficient and transparent method of resolving disputes in the .uk Top Level Domain. Through the DRS they seek to settle .uk domain name disputes through mediation, and where this is not possible, through an independent expert decision.

All expert decisions are published on their web site. Nominet have now launched a decisions search function. The search function allows users to search through the full wording of decisions for key phrases or words. Specific searches can also be made using the domain name, date, result, expert, complainant or respondent.

Nominet are also in the process of tagging all decisions in a number of categories. A case will be tagged based on which part of the dispute policy it relates to, for example, typosquatting, passing off or trademark infringement. We will also tag cases based on the field of activity or industry to which the domain name relates. The tag search function is an ongoing project and it will take us some time to complete the tagging process for all historic decisions.

DRS decisions will still be published using our RSS feed. You can subscribe to the DRS RSS feed to ensure that you are alerted to new decisions as soon as they are published.

What this means for Trademark and brand owners…

Having consulted on dozens of Dispute Resolution  cases in the past few years knowing what to write and how to approach the situation is the key. Now via the Nominet DRS search function knowing what to write can be extensively researched from previous case history. They even talk about giving search functions by the type of abusive registration whether its Typo’s or squatting. The big power brands such as Expedia and GoCompare have put a lot of effort into their domain reacquisition process so why not make use of their internal experts writings for your own personal issues. I’ve always thought that the .co.uk process for taking back a domain for being an abusive registration was the easiest of any tld…now with an extensive library of case history to go on it got even easier and less daunting for anybody to take action and be confident in their arguments.

What this means for domainers

Not all domainers abusively register domains. However if you have domains that are closely aligned with any trademark or brand you might find an email from Nominet arriving in your mailbox in the not too distant future.

If you have a case which you want looked at email me at contact@leewoodman.co.uk. Having looked through several of the DRS case profiles there are some which I’d feel confident of winning should it go to appeal.