March 2007 Archives

Big news for us over at topix.net. As of this evening, we are officially using the topix.com domain name.

"Big deal," you say. Yes, big deal.

From a marketing and brand recognition perspective, moving from dot net to dot com is a no-brainer. Name one successful website that has, or is doing well with a dot net address. I defy you. Yahoo.net? Google.net? I just doesn't sound right.

The crown jewel is to own "your name dot com." Dot net is sort of like the Shemp of domain names. It ain't Curley, and it ain't dot com.

Fine. So now we have dot com. What does that mean for topix?

Well, thats the rub. See, at topix more than half our traffic comes to us via search engine queries. Rich and the gang spent their first few years optimizing topix.net so that it would always show up as one of the top results for "anything" news people might be searching for on Yahoo or Google (or Ask, or whatever...).

Britney Spears news? George Bush news? Yeah, that's us up at the top. For those and thousands more. Try "Your-Hometown news", or "Your-Zip-Code news." I bet if we're not number one, we're pretty close.

However, all that fine tuning was for topix.net. Dot net. At this point its easier for me, and better for you as a reader, to point you to this article just published on wallstreetjournal.com. It's an interview with Rich explaining the perils we face in making the domain switch. We stand to lose some of our SEO mojo and potentially take a pretty heavy hit to our traffic. But we're ready to weather that storm.

In a few weeks we're launching a redesigned, rebranded topix.com. Our goal is to redefine what topix is to everyone... not just Google's algorithms. Stay tuned.