Company files complaint over sites that use its Flickr brand.

Yahoo has turned to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to help it shut down two X-rated sites that use Flickr in their domain names.

The company filed the complaint with WIPO over the domain names nastyflickr.com and nudeflickr.com, each of which lead to a web site containing adult photos. They each contain a logo that looks similar to the Flickr blue and red logo as well. They are owned by a Tacoma, Washington man.

This isn’t the first time Yahoo has gotten into a fight over the Flickr brand. In 2009 Yahoo sued AshantiPLC, which is owned in part by domain investor Sahar Sarid, over the domain name Flicker.com (without the missing ‘e’). Yahoo said that Ashanti had purchased Flicker.com for $55,000 in 2006 and had been flaunting the domain and the traffic it received. The company allegedly turned down a $700,000 offer for the domain.

Yahoo eventually settled the case and got the Flicker.com domain name.

Domain parking ad providers make changes.

There have been two announcements from the big domain parking ad providers over the past 24 hours that may affect your domain parking company.

According to an email from NameDrive, Google is banning URL forwarding as of October 1. The parking company says clients need to switch to DNS parking, although it says it’s also working on other solutions. [Update: DomainSponsor just sent a notice to its customers as well.]

Partners have known about Google’s plan to ban URL forwarding for a long time.

It will be interesting to see what effect Google’s move will have on domain parking split-testing platforms such as Above.

TrafficZ sent an email to customers yesterday informing them that Yahoo is “capping” revenue on .biz, .co,
.info, .tv, and .us domain names. If the cap is hit, Yahoo will no longer show ads on the domains for three days. However, parking companies will likely display ads from different ad feeds during this period. From my experience, some of these secondary feeds perform quite well on certain TLDs.

Both of these moves address challenges with domain parking; namely fraud. URL forward is frequently abused and limits Google’s insight into the traffic it is monetizing. Domains such as .biz shouldn’t get much type-in traffic, which may be the reason for the cap.

Yahoo to transition to Bing search results very soon.

It’s time to stop talking about Yahoo search rankings and the traffic the search engine delivers to your site. Starting as early as next month, no one will care how well you’ve tricked Yahoo into ranking your site well.

Today Yahoo! sent out a communication to its advertisers telling them about the transition of organic search results to those of Bing. According to the email:

Assuming our testing continues to yield high quality results, we anticipate that our organic search results will be powered by Bing beginning in the August/September timeframe.

If organic search results are an important source of referrals to your website, you’ll want to make sure that you’re prepared for this change.

I often see people brag about how their minisites or mass-produced web sites rank high on Yahoo and get traffic as a result. As soon as the changeover occurs, all that will matter is how well you rank in Bing and Google.

As we get closer to advertising transition, scope of changes become apparent.

We’re getting nearer to D-Day, when the Yahoo and Microsoft ad deal starts to affect advertisers on the former’s platform.

Here’s just one example of the headaches ahead for Yahoo advertisers. Today the company sent out an email telling all of its advertisers that it will need to cut their ad headline length to no more than 25 characters. Yahoo currently allows 40.

This means that existing Yahoo pay-per-click advertisers need to login and adjust all of their headlines. Otherwise they will be truncated for you when the transition occurs to Microsoft Adcenter.

You really don’t need 40 characters, but still. Consider Yahoo’s own ad headline for the keyword “domain name”:

“Yahoo! Web Hosting – Build Your Website”

If the company doesn’t do anything, it’s ad might look something like:

“Yahoo! Web Hosting – Buil”

Advertisers are also going to have to deal with changes in how keywords are mapped to each other and in minimum bids.

The search alliance will obviously lose some advertisers who don’t want to deal with the headaches. But these will probably be smaller advertisers. Most advertisers will find the combined reach of Yahoo and Bing too much to pass up, even if it creates a big headache.

Yahoo now has Flicker.com for Flickr.com web site.

As Michael Berkens pointed out today, Yahoo now owns the domain name Flicker.com.

But this wasn’t your typical domain name sale. It was actually the culmination of year long anti-cybersquatting lawsuit brought against the Flicker.com owner AshantiPLC, which is owned in part by domain investor Sahar Sarid.

Yahoo’s lawsuit against the Ashanti was filed in July 2009. Yahoo alleged that the defendants purchased the domain name for $55,000 on eBay in July 2006. The suit chronicles what the defendants did with the name after they bought it, including showing traffic stats and citing numerous rejected offers. (They even turned down a $700,000 offer.) It also states that the defendants placed ads to camera companies on the domain name. Yahoo alleged that the defendants responded to twitter inquiries about Flicker.com being down.

You can read Yahoo’s original lawsuit here, and the defendant’s response here.

The parties entered mediation and settled the case, with Yahoo dismissing it last week. Details of the settlement were not disclosed.