Domainers have been busy buying up .pro domains since September 2008, when RegistryPro relaxed the domain extension’s certification requirements.

Launched in 2004, .pro domain ownership was limited to an elite few professionals in fields such as accounting, engineering, law and medicine. Plus, to be eligible for a .pro domain, these professionals had to be based in Canada, Germany,  UK and the US.

The registration process was full of cumbersome twists and turns, and .pro ownership cost several hundreds of dollars.

Continue reading →

Don’t get lazy with search engine spiders, or they’ll bite you.

A long-time client contacted Webcopyplus to find out why their high rankings went downhill. In a matter of two months, they went from page one to falling off the radar for a couple of lucrative search terms. Their Google PageRank, indicating Google’s trust in their website, also dropped from 5/10 to 3/10.

We reviewed their web writing and meta data, and both checked out. Their inbound links were also relatively stable.

Upon further inspection, it was discovered that they were using duplicate web writing on many blog posts.

Google doesn’t like duplicate content. It’s considered a spam or black hat SEO tactic, and can result in dropped rankings, or even elimination from the search engine altogether.

A simple way to find out if your website has been penalized is to search for your domain name on Google. If your site doesn’t appear as the first result, there’s a good chance you’ve been penalized.

And if Google can’t find any page of your site if you search for “site:yourdomain.com” then it’s almost certain your site’s been knocked off its index.

Continue reading →