XYZ makes .com’s trending keywords list.
The .XYZ domain name has garnered a lot of attention since Google’s new parent company Alphabet selected ABC.XYZ for its domain name in August.
Now XYZ is hot in .com.
Verisign released its monthly review of the top “trending” keywords in .com for last month, and sitting at #6 is .xyz.
Verisign and .XYZ are due in court early next month for a false advertising lawsuit, in which Verisign claims .xyz’s marketing has hurt .com. Hmmm…perhaps it’s the other way around?
In reviewing the 2,000+ .com registrations including “xyz” last month, it doesn’t seem that they have anything to do with Alphabet. Over 500 of them are in the form “word”couponsxyz.com.
Here are the top 10 trending keywords in .com from September:
1. Mail
2. OK
3. Coupons
4. Ghost
5. Plumbing
6. .XYZ
7. Bubble
8. Dentist
9. Savannah
10. Chain
Most people misunderstand what these “trending” keyword reports from Verisign represent.
For instance, on September 16, here’s how many .COM domains were registered containing the following keywords:
4017 … “online”
2095 … “tech”
1718 … “group”
35 … “xyz”
That’s right. The ratio of “online” to “xyz” is more than 100 to 1.
Notice “online”, “tech”, and “group” are not even listed among the top 10 “trending” keywords. So why is “xyz” found in that list?
The incidence of “XYZ” in .Ceems to be due almost entirely to 2 spikes:
1037 on September 12
512 on September 29
That leaves only 799 domains registered during the other 28 days of September – averaging just 28.5 per day.
If “xyz” shows up as trending, then it’s due to that September 12th spike.
It’s also worth noting that Verisign NameView shows both new registrations and renewals, while the data in the monthly trending report is based only on new registrations.