Irish Google and Yahoo Both Hijacked
It was confirmed today that for several hours Tuesday both google.ie and yahoo.ie were hijacked by as yet unknown perpetrators. Officers of the Irish Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation are trying to track down both who did the deed and how they did it. Both domains are currently managed by MarkMonitor, a San Francisco-based registrar.
The breach occurred through MarkMonitor but there are no clues as to how it was accomplished. The hijackers managed to access the nameservers and change them. The IE Domain Registry worked with MarkMonitor to reset and secure the nameserver records as soon as they realized what had happened.
During the breach, the sites appear to have been pointing to a site registered in Indonesia, according to Sophos security expert Graham Cluley.
Study Shows First Link Gets 53% of Organic Clicks
Compete.com released the results of a study they completed using the data gathered in the last quarter of 2011. Tens of millions of results pages were analyzed and showed that a whopping 85% of all search results pages generated were from organic search, leaving 15% to come from paid listings.
Of those organic search clicks, 53% went to the very first link while only 15% went to the second link and the remaining 19% split with the next three links. That’s a huge difference in traffic from being number one in search versus number two. We’ve all known that there would be a big difference but the numbers surprised even many of the experts.
Google Tweaks Layout Algorithm
According to a tweet by Google’s Matt Cutts, today’s first official update to last January’s page layout algorithm will only affect .7% of the English queries in any noticeable way. If you find your site affected and make changes, remember that Google has stated it could “take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes”.
Search Engine Watch has asked for confirmation that webmaster can actually recover from the update by modifying and waiting for the site to be crawled again. They’ve promised to post an update on their blog if and when they get a response from Google.
After TRAFFIC Conference
The live domain auction had a lot of complaints going around the web. These complaints centered on the prohibition on internet bidding and that one of the auctioneers wasn’t very good at the job. There doesn’t look like there were any superstar sales. A number of really good domain names sold much lower than many expected. For example, FinancialGoals.com went for a paltry $3000 and SmartLawyer.com went for only $2250. CheapLaptops.com did pretty well at $20,000 but the last update seen says it’s subject to approval.
The awards were given out this year at Tuesday morning’s brunch. Best Overall Domain Solution went to Sedo.com with Sedo’s Dave Evanson taking home Broker of the Year.
Other awards:
• Best New Monetizing Solution – DomainPower.com
Best Domain Blog – DomainSherpa.com
The “We Get It”Award – SalesForce.com
Developer of the Year – Alan Dunn of DomainHoldings
Sponsor of the Year – Escrow.com
Domainer of the Year went to Frank Schilling – anyone surprised?
And finally, two new additions to the Domain Hall of Fame were Chad Folkenning and Michael Mann.