Not much for now, but MLB SEO strategist sees a bright future.
I just listened to a ClickZ webinar about .brand domain names sponsored by Neustar. I was particularly interested in hearing what Matt Dorville, SEO and Content Strategist for Major League Baseball, had to say.
MLB owns both .MLB and .Baseball, and I’m curious what the organization plans to do with these domain names. As I pointed out two years ago, MLB could be a big engine for new top level domain name awareness.
Dorville didn’t mention any specific domain examples but said the goal is to make it really easy for fans to get to the content they’re looking for. He said that Google’s recent change to 300-level redirects in which link juice passes through means that a company can promote something like my.brand as a shortcut to a page on its site and still get the SEO benefit.
During the webinar and in companion articles on Neustar’s new MakeWay.World site, Dorville noted that MLB effectively does this with team.com names right now. He noted that names like Yankees.com and Cardinals.com are actually vanity URLs that forward to pages within MLB.com.
This got me wondering if MLB is doing the same thing with teamname.MLB names. And, if you type in something like Cubs.mlb, you’ll see that this is the case.
Dorville said that one of the best things about owning a .brand is that you don’t have to try to buy the domain you want from someone else. Referring to domain investors, he noted that “they are not my favorite.” (MLB has to paid a lot of money to buy team names in .com.)
Snoopy says
The webinar is mostly rubbish, starting with the heading
“Still using.com? Here’s why 50% of all Fortune 500 companies are about to use “.brand””
Another that is a very dubious claim by Neustar,
“Why so many of The Fortune 500 are making the switch”
The .mlb person complained about .com aftermarket prices, but it doesn’t sound like MLB has actually done anything with .brand tlds. There was no examples given, no data, just an idea of what people “could” do.