The first Internet addresses with non-Latin characters will soon be online after today's approval of the new Internationalized Domain Name Fast Track Process by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush.
Some UK Google users have noticed that search results pages are showing more results from .com sites these days, than in the past. They are used to .co.uk sites getting better rank, and assuming that they are more relevant to their geographic location.
Certainly in some cases the .co.uk site would be more relevant to a UK searcher, but that is not always the case. Google's Matt Cutts has posted a video in which he answers a question on this subject from a user. The question was:
Three South American domain registrars have lost their accreditation according to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The reason for this is that they have failed to comply with the requirements of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA).
The registrars involved include South American Domains, which does business under NameFrog.com, Simply Named (SimplyNamed.com), and Tahoe Domains.
Domain front running is when "insider information" is gathered by a party from monitoring attempts by an Internet user to check the availability of a domain name, and then that info is used to by that party to register that domain name.
The .yu ccTLD for Yugoslavia will cease to be available for websites on September 30th. This has been known for a while, but there has been a two-year transition period for existing sites using .yu.
Since the date is only a few months away, Google is offering some tips for easing the transition on the company's Webmaster Central blog. Search Quality Senior Analyst Luisella Mazza says to:
Until now, the .MX country code top-level domain of Mexico has only been offered to a few select institutions. Now the country is making it available for wide use - starting September 1.
Naturally well-known domain registrar GoDaddy has jumped at the occasion to announce its own availability of the ccTLDs extensions. Actually, the company opened registration for the sub-extension .COM.MX back in May. Anyone who owned a sub-extension before March 1 can participate in .MX domain pre-resistration.
The fastest growing country code top-level domain is .ME. The .ME Registry just announced that the extension has hit a quarter million domains registered.
"This is the kind of reaction we always knew we would elicit with dot-ME," says Predrag Lesic, executive director of the .ME Registry. "Dot-ME has become an Internet phenomenon."
It's always interesting to see what domains are sold for big money. The other day, the domain Ad.com was sold for $1.4 million at a live auction.
This was by far the most money spent on a domain at the event, which saw 91 domains sold for a total of $2,133,350. The average selling price per domain was $23,443. Here is a list of the top sellers and how much they sold for:
Ad.com - $1,400,000
BottledWater.com - $45,000
Athletic.com - $40,000
Vixen.com - $32,500
Shutter.com - $25,000
Compete has shared some interesting data looking at homepage visitors at the top publisher sites. Here is the top 12 in terms of domain visitors. Look at how the homepage visitors compare to the percentage of site visitors who visit the homepage.
SEOmoz has a couple of very interesting charts showing the top 500 domains and the top 500 pages being linked to from different places. This paints a pretty good picture of what sites are held in the highest regards by content producers.
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