Domain Names and SEO with Bill Hartzer

In this webinar of DeepSEOConference, we sit down with Bill Hartzer, to discuss some of the security holes that far too many website owners neglect to plug, and what can happen, as a result.

Bill talks about some of the ways that hackers, rather than just hacking into your website, steal the entire site AND your domain. As you can imagine, for an ecommerce website – or any business that depends upon its online presence, being rendered suddenly invisible can be a death knell for your business.

In addition to pointing out some oversights that can leave you particularly vulnerable to some fairly inventive tactics employed by these thieves, he also gives a strong recommendation for a very affordable product that makes it virtually impossible for this to happen to you. 

If you have a website, this interview is well worth taking the time to watch… and take some notes… and then follow his advice. As always, there’s also a transcript below the video. 

Transcript

00:01
Steve: Hello, everybody, and welcome to another Deep SEO Conference Webinar. I’m Steve Gerencser and the guy up there in the top left is Doc Sheldon. Today we are talking with Bill Hartzer, about SEO and domain names, and the various ways those can affect you and maybe even touch a little bit on the recent GoDaddy drama where things were horribly, horribly wrong at GoDaddy, if we have time for it. Bill owns and runs Bill Hartzer Consulting, or Hartzer Consulting. And he’s also the data scientist over at DM Protect. So he’s a couple of levels smarter than the rest of us. So it’s always good to hear what he has to say. Bill, how’re you doing?

00:50
Bill: Good, doing well.

Steve: Awesome.

Bill: So a little bit, I guess, about my background. I’ve been doing SEO before it was SEO, back in the last century, which was back in the late 90s, and so forth.

Doc: Web positioning.

Bill: And I sold my first domain name back in 1998. And I’ve been dealing with SEO and domains and I’ve got a lot of blogs over the years, been in several different SEO agencies. Around 2016, I went out on my own. And then, about two years ago I started a company called DM Protect, which protects domain names. We also deal with a lot of stolen domain names as well, and where we’re recovering stolen domain names, and dealing with issues.

01:53
Actually, you mentioned that a lot of people might be interested in here, related to domains, so forth. I mean, it started back originally with the exact match domain names, where if you had redwidgets.com, then you were given some kind of essentially more brownie points for having; redwidgets.com, and it would rank better. And I don’t recall off the top of my head the actual date, but I remember, it was a Saturday morning, about 8:30 or so. And I got a call from an SEO client. And his rankings had just tanked. And that was the time when they did basically the EMD update. You can go back and see all the records of the fallout of that and what it really meant.

03:00
But basically, Google was actually giving, essentially, a better credit — if you will — if you had an exact match domain name. If you had redwidgets.com, you actually could rank better, and it was giving some extra PageRank, or brownie, whatever it was. And basically, when they did the EMD update, that actually stopped giving that credit. That’s really the only thing that happened.

03:46
Steve: We used to laugh and talk about how many hyphens could you get away with in a domain name before you were considered to be keyword spamming in your URLs.

03:56
Bill: Sure. I remember some domains… I came across an expired domain that had 26 words. It had all of the words from stocks to stocks and hyphen MySpace hyphen… All the keywords of the day were all stuffed in there.

04:30
Doc: More like an exact match paragraph.

04:36
Bill: Yes, definitely. But it was interesting, that particular domain, none of the keywords were related to each other. They were all just words, popular words thrown in there. So, I have seen…

04:53
Doc: “Spaghetti” Rank!

04:55
Bill: Yeah, exactly. Fast and a little bit more, in 2013 or so, we had the new TLDs come out. And now we’re up to about, I’d say, I think there’s about 850 that are live, where you had keyword dot keyword. One of the domains I tested early on was threecarat.diamonds. And what I did is I took threecaratdiamonds and put up a landing page on there, and then also bought threecaratdiamonds.com, ran a bunch of PPC ads. The only difference was the domain name versus the ad copy, the landing page. The keywords I bid on were all $1 a click. So in fact, we went through that and wanted to see if using Google ads, whether or not a domain name was any different between one or the other, just because they were very new.

06:21
So, in fact, bidding $1 a click, spent about $10,000, and we ended up seeing that the dot-com costs 86 cents per click on the average, and the dot diamonds was 46 cents a click. So we got a lot more for our money because the quality score was higher with the dot-diamonds domain. So since then, what I’ve realized is even if you’re using a dot-club, or a dot-forsale, or a dot-XYZ, if you use something other than a dot-com, your Quality Score ends up being higher. And so you will pay less per click. And so you get more for your money. So if you spent $10,000 at $1 a click… As I said, you’d spend 86 cents on a dot-com per click and 46 cents on average for a dot-whatever.

07:26
Doc: That’s a substantial difference.

Bill: It is. And I’ve tested it over the years, and it just continues to be like that. And so if you have an E-commerce site, for example, and sure, it is on a dot com. It may be worth it to actually set up some landing pages on a… if you’re selling diamond engagement rings online, then a dot diamonds, put a landing page on there and essentially filter the traffic over, maybe you have a landing page. That’s the way I have been doing it with this diamond retailer. And they sell diamond engagement rings. And we basically have a dot-diamonds, we have the landing page set up. All the PPC traffic goes to that landing page on the dot-diamonds.

08:25
And essentially, the shop now and the navigation basically brings them over to the dot-com. And as far as the PPC costs, we’ve been basically able to cut it in half over the past four or five years, using that method, using a dot-diamonds versus a dot-com. They’ve built other sites also on the dot-diamonds, but this particular retailer continues to use the dot-com.

09:00
So looking at these TLDs, one of the tests that I ran about a year ago was to basically set up… we took the top 15 TLDs, based on the number of domain registrations. It’s interesting. Just as a reminder, you can go to the NTLD stats, and you can actually see; NTLDstats.com. And it’ll show you a live view of how many domains have been registered at different top TLDs, which ones are the most popular, and dot-XYZ and dot-ICU and based on a number of domain registrations. So basically, we took the top 15 dot-ICU, dot-top, dot-VIP and some others and then threw in dot-com, dot-net, dot-org.

10:00
Some CCTLDs like dot-co, dot-co-dot-UK and so forth. Set up 15 sites with nonsense content on them. Okay. And each one is a 25-page site, each one had a keyword, nonsense keyword that we targeted. So basically, we set up the sites and measured, crawling/indexing rates, and actually ranking for the keyword. And there was a nonsense word. So we use the nonsense word, NLCS Noxa Man. Noxaman.top, Noxaman.com, dot-net, dot-org, and so forth.

10:58
So that keyword also was only in the domain name. So this test for the SEO side allowed us to test a lot of things, the crawling and indexing. So all of these 15 sites, in fact, we submitted them in Google Search Console, basically at the same time, as fast as I could type them in, and copy and paste. Within two hours to three hours, every single page on the index-dot-XYZ was crawled and indexed. After four or five… So that one in particular, when it comes down to the dot-com, the dot-net, dot-org, some of those sites, even though they were in there at the same time, and essentially have the same starting point, some of them took three or four days to get crawled and indexed, versus the XYZ, which was crawled and indexed within a few hours.

12:17
So, definitely, it seems Google, for some reason, really loves crawling and indexing dot-XYZ domains.

12:29
Doc: It makes me wonder, and it’s pure conjecture, but could it be, for instance, that Google has earmarked certain bot networks for crawling to certain TLDs? So here’s a new TLD that is less popular. So that would seem like that might explain why they would get crawled faster. But who knows?

12:59
Bill: Yes, it’s very possible. As far as rankings go, the dot net blew everything away. And the dot-net always ranked better. And even eight months later, the dot-net ranked better for its fictitious keyword plus the keyword in the domain. So, what’s interesting is, none of these sites, none had this fake keyword, it was only in the domain name. And so, there are two things we can see from that; that fake keyword that’s only in the domain name, we know, if you went to Google and typed in that keyword, you could see the rankings, and the dot-net always ranking higher than the others.

13:58
There were no links, there were no anchor text links, and that keyword never appeared on the website. So we know that Google reads the keyword in the domain name and they do something with that. We know that they read it, we know also that they read the ending as well. So if you have realestate.forsale, they are reading the word real estate and they’re reading the word for sale. We could search for noxaman, which was the fake keyword in the domain, noxaman club and noxaman.club would rank number one. So we know that Google in particular is reading the keyword in the beginning of the domain and at the end of the domain.

15:14
Same thing with searching for keyword space com or keyword space club or keyword space ICU or keyword and so forth. We know there’s an association there. How much weight or not, we don’t know, but we do know that they are reading the word in the domain.

15:45
Steve: We’re seeing something similar with the Google My Business or Google business profiles (I’ll never get used to this) where the domain names seem to make more of a difference at the local level as well. When you’re doing local services for a specific city, you can get your city name and your service in the URL, especially in real estate. It gives you that leg up in real estate search versus the big players, the Zillows, the Trulias and realtor.com. It at least gives you an opportunity to get in the map pack better which is unusual, because they keep saying domain names don’t matter but obviously they do.

16:33
Bill: Yes, definitely. And I see the same thing. I have an online reputation management client that came to me two months ago, a celebrity that came to me and said, “Well, she doesn’t really like the results that are showing up. And it was interesting, because she wasn’t, she wasn’t really concerned about Google, she was concerned more about Bing and Bing’s results. Because actually, Google’s results looked pretty good compared to Bing.

And so literally, in that case, buying her name.com and dot-net and dot-org, and putting up websites. Essentially, what I did is I set up a site using a… There’s a site – thispersondoesnotexist… so it’s an AI-generated, face and person essentially created a whole persona of a person around that domain name. And that ranks very, very well in Bing. And so Bing really seems to give a favorable result to the exact match or the keyword in the domain. And it goes back to the same thing with companies. Even if you just use your companyname.com, you know, there’s a good chance if you are such and such systems.com and you use your company name, you’re going to rank for your unique company name. I think there’s a benefit there, to having your companyname.com

18:41
Same thing. Obviously, for your own personal reputation, obviously getting DocSheldon.com, Bill.Hartzer.com and so forth, and always putting up a page or a small site on there. Definitely, it is a positive thing. I talk a lot to college students who were in different internet marketing classes, and one of the recommendations I have; you’re starting out, you need to start thinking about your reputation online when potential employers search, you got to get yourname.com because that’s going to give you a leg up especially if you connect your social accounts and your and so forth to your name, that you’re going to be able to control those results. And I’m amazed also about how many celebrities and so forth that don’t claim their knowledge panel in Google, they haven’t done that, they have not, they don’t have their own dot-com name, they have not taken control, essentially, of their search results.

20:05
Doc: Obviously, there’s the branding benefit of doing that. But there’s also the insurance benefit of keeping some ne’er do well from grabbing your name and painting you with all kinds of stuff. That’s just putting a target on your back.

20:21
Bill: Well, what’s happening now is as SEOs, those celebrities are actually coming to us come, coming to me, coming to other friends of mine, to fix all those issues. Once there’s something mentioned in the news that they don’t like, now they’re having to fork out a fair amount of money to essentially fix the results. And you need to be on the offensive rather than the defensive, essentially. And there are some that get it and, and then there are some that don’t, and they don’t like some kind of photo or video that’s showing up, and they just want to get that, or a news article or something, and they want to get that pushed down. One more thing that SEO and domains test is that I know a lot of sites use the dot-co because they’re not able to get the dot-com, so they’ll use the dot-co.

21:43
And what’s interesting is that there are certain CCHL, TLDs, like dot-co. Google actually considers that dot-co to be in Spanish – that’s the default. And because it’s actually a CCTLD for Colombia. So many sites in the US do use the dot-co in English, and you have to actually go above and beyond to use hreflang tags, and the language tags actually specify that it’s in English. And so it’s interesting because of this 25-page site which was essentially Latin type of nonsense content.

22:34
Google never even looked at the content, they just said, “Okay, this is in Spanish, and when you see the search results you have to translate it.” And they assumed it was in Spanish, while it was nonsense content that was not in any language. And so they just assumed that it was in Spanish just from the get-go. So there are a lot of things that we kind of can glean from that we’ve gotten end results from that particular test.

23:13
Steve: Very cool. I wanted to ask you a little bit about it before we get too close on time here, then try to pay a little more attention to what’s going on in domain names. We’ve had a couple of clients, not so much recently, but I’ve seen clients who’ve lost their domain names because their web developer registered it and then vanished, for whatever reason. So you’ve got the issue of just losing them because nobody renewed them and then they get snapped up by somebody who collects old domain names to profit off of them, just to hold. And then, of course, you’ve got the other side where people are just straight-up stealing domain names, and GoDaddy still seems to be about the worst for allowing that to happen. And so I wanted to learn a little more about the DN Protect side of things and how you can secure your domain a little better and things like that.

24:20
Bill: Sure. A lot of it is who has access to the domain registrar account. And we’re seeing things like ex-employees or IT administrators leave, but they’ll take the domain with them when they leave which really is stealing a domain. It’s a company asset. And just because you have access to the user ID and password of a domain registrar account it doesn’t mean that you can go in and transfer the domain to yourself. So that’s more of a civil issue. Unfortunately, there are certain registrar’s that will not police that. It essentially comes to like, for example, there’s been several cases that we’ve dealt with in particular that if somebody has, let’s say, an employee, and the employee has just basically just gone in, and when they got fired, they took the domain and the GoDaddy account and changed it after they left the company, and took the domain and website and everything.

25:53
In that case, GoDaddy essentially says to the client, or the customer or the company, they essentially say, well, you knew, or you know who the person is, who essentially stole your domain, we’re not going to get involved, and the only way we’ll make any changes is if we have a US court order. We have a case that just came to me about an hour ago, and the same exact thing. It involves a different registrar, but an ex-employee who was an, you know, the IT or the administrator of the main website. And he left, he took the domain and website with him. And basically, the only thing at this point is really, you got to file a police report. So the company is filing a police report in their local jurisdiction. So they have that documentation, and then DN Protect, as a third party, basically can take this police report and show it to the ex-employee and say, this is officially a theft and we’re urging you to do the right thing and give it back, and let’s resolve this. We have domain attorneys on staff, and so we can actually do a US court filing, UDRP domain disputes and so forth.

27:53
We did have a case that I resolved that took three weeks. Unfortunately, it took three weeks, but it was with GoDaddy, plain and simple. An IT company in Orlando had 50 client sites, some of them very large sites. And the server got hacked. And they got access to the root of the server, somewhere from out of the country. And they just started transferring domains to several different registrars outside of GoDaddy. And there were at least six or seven different registrars. They had access to the server so that they could reply to the emails, for example, and turn off the two-factor authentication and so forth. But they had access to the emails on the server.

28:49
So in that particular case, we basically stepped in. I have certain contacts at most of the domain registrars, at least the ones that get domains transferred to them that are stolen. And in those cases, within an hour, we’re able to get the domain locked down and taken care of. Frankly, I’m just still amazed that it took three weeks to get all the 50 domains back to the owner. It took three or four days to get him back. His was a GoDaddy hosted server. So it took three or four days for them to give him access back to his own server.

29:44
Even though the other registrars were good about getting everything returned, there still has to be… Basically, among registrars when a domain is stolen, if they are stolen from GoDaddy and transferred to Two Cows or so forth, then Two Cows has to sign an agreement with GoDaddy, an indemnification agreement that basically says that, yes, this is stolen, and we’re transferring it back, and there’s not going to be any legal repercussions later on, because we’re transferring it back to you, and so forth. So it took GoDaddy three weeks to sign those agreements to get the domains back.

30:35
Doc: It can take them that long just to answer the phone, though. Customer service is not high on their list of priorities.

30:42
Bill: Yeah. So sometimes you kind of look at it and say, we may hear about more domains, so one or more accounts compromised with GoDaddy because of the number of domains and customer accounts they have. But at the same time, we’ve had, you know, issues with other registrars from Network Solutions. Network Solutions had a breach, probably five-plus years ago. And on the dark web, there are still user IDs and passwords floating out there that somebody could get access to. So somebody has not changed their user ID and password since the hack. And so basically, they’re able to just go in and get these names and access the accounts and just transfer them out.

31:47
So there are two other issues that we’ve had. If someone hacks into a registrar or a domain account, whether it’s Network Solutions or GoDaddy or wherever it is, and they transfer to another registrar, then there basically is a record of who the person is who stole the domain because somebody knows who has the domain now, whether it was stolen and transferred to somebody in China. In China, there’s a name or there’s some account there, potentially.

32:36
Well, what’s happening now is people are going into a GoDaddy account, a Uda registry account, a Network Solutions account. They’ll go into the account, and instead of transferring it, they’ll actually just delete the domain. So when you buy a domain name… I can go into my account, and I can say, “Oh, I don’t want this anymore, I can just delete it out of my account”. Well, actually, it then becomes available, and so that anybody else can come and pick it up. So what’s happening is, these thieves are going into your account, and deleting the domain. They’re the only ones that know that well, it is available, so then they can go and register it.

33:30
And so it stops kind of that record of, they can say well, oh, I just happened to see that it was available so I registered the domain. I didn’t necessarily steal it. But I did that.

33:48
Doc: When you say that it becomes available, is that an almost immediate thing or does it take a couple-three days?

33:55
Bill: It depends on the registrar. In some cases, it’s fairly quick. And I’m dealing with a case now, almost six months back and forth, where somebody bought a domain name for $5,000 back in 2020. And it’s a pretty valuable domain, but a $5,000 cap on domain auction or something. He bought the domain and he renewed it for five years. So, if you look at the Whois record, the ownership, we can look back, we can look back on the domain history of who owns domains and all the changes. If you look back, that domain is actually renewed till 2025, which now is in the future.

35:02
Well, somebody went in and hacked into his account and deleted the name. And so you can see in the history that it was renewed till 2025. But then, all of a sudden, it was just deleted for some reason, and then someone instantly bought it the same day that it was deleted. So why would somebody pay $5000, renew it, for $10 a year, for five years in the future, and then delete his own domain? It does not make sense whatsoever. Somebody hacked into the account or got into his account, disabled the two-factor authentication, deleted the name and then went ahead and registered the domain. Everything from dealing with a couple of different domain registrars and the legal aspects of it and getting everything, there’s police reports involved that had been filed, and documentation and everything.

36:12
So we’re still dealing with that. And that’s happened more than once. So, finally, there’s a very interesting case that came up today, that I really actually wasn’t really aware of, but it is actually a loophole that people are taking advantage of, or thieves are taking advantage of. And it’s kind of a DNS hack. So let’s say you use Cloudflare; I use Cloudflare on a few sites.

36:50
So, essentially, CloudFlare, if you don’t know, is essentially a filter. So you host your website at wherever, AWS or wherever your web host is, and you have your domain at GoDaddy or Network Solutions or Epic. So what happens there is that you change your name servers so that they point to Cloudflare. So when the Internet traffic comes in, it goes through Cloudflare and says, “Okay, Cloudflare says, is this a bad bot? Or is this a human, or is it real traffic?” So they kind of filter out and then they cache your page from your server. So you get the benefit of filtering out bad bots, and you get the benefits of caching and so forth. Great.

37:42
Well, what’s happening is that the thief will go and look at all of the domains. And you can see this in the DNS checkers, you can see every single domain name that is pointed to a Cloudflare name server. There might be 1000 different domains. What they’re doing is, they will take that list and add that list of domains to their account. Well, what’s happening is, someone will set up, point their domain to Cloudflare. But they will forget to add that domain to their account. And so what’s happening is that that domain is pointing to Cloudflare but it’s in limbo, it’s not assigned to an account. So the thief then basically takes that list and sees which ones are not assigned to accounts so they literally can take control of the DNS of the domain, and point it to wherever they want to. They can point it to their own web server, they can point it to somewhere else, they have access to the mail records and everything.

38:55
So they’re completely getting control of your domain. So in this case, this customer came to us and said, “What’s going on here? All of a sudden, we have this happening.” And so after the investigation, after I looked into everything, it turns out that they had a list of 50 or 60 domains that they own and copy and paste and pointed all to their Cloudflare account, but there were a few that were left off. And so somebody else came in just added those domains to their Cloudflare account, and completely took control over this company’s website and so forth through the DNS and pointed it to somewhere else.

39:52
Doc: That’s innovative – you’ve got to give them credit for that.

39:54
Bill: Yes. So, unfortunately, the problem is that, based on DNS record, you and I can look up and get a list of all the domains that are pointed to Cloudflare as name servers, and literally just copy and paste and see which ones are available, and just literally take over domains…

40:17
Doc: It seems like it would also be very simple for the CDN to simply require an account attribution before they let you finalize the transfer. Make that a required step.

40:30
Bill: That right now is currently a loophole and has been with Cloudflare. And it’s not only just Cloudflare, there are multiple, multiple, multiple services like that, that you have the case where some expired domains or some domains on GoDaddy’s name server, or GoDaddy’s auctions, or any of these domain auctions. The name servers don’t change when the domain is transferred. So it may be still leftover and still leftover and still pointed to Cloudflare or to Max CDN or any of these others.

And they’re certainly taking advantage of that. And in theory, that is the start. Once they have control over the DNS, then they have control over the mail for that domain. So then they can essentially steal the domain as well. I could go on for hours, but there’s a very public case that just went through a UDRP domain dispute.

41:41
Airbnb owned tilt.com. And they had that domain for years. In the Whois record they still had an email address of customtilt.com. And in the Whois, well, somebody went and bought customtilt.com and then they were able essentially to steal tilt.com from Airbnb because that email address, customtilt.com, was in the Whois record of tilt.com. But they bought the domain and they were able to steal it that way. That went through a UDRP domain dispute process. And it was found that the domain was actually not given back to Airbnb. That thief actually continued to have that domain.

42:49
So you really have to be watching your Whois records, make sure you have access, and so forth. Because we have ex-employees, we have others who just gain access through different means. And in a lot of these cases, none of them is the same. You renew your domain for several years. Just because you don’t get an email saying that you need to renew your domain is not an excuse that you need to renew your domain. Some people come to us saying, “We didn’t get the email to renew.” Well, that’s not necessarily a reason. You renew it for 10 years. epic.com has a deal, you can renew your domain forever. They’re the only ones you can pay 300 something dollars, and one time and Epic will renew your domain forever. It’s a forever registration.

44:01
Steve: It’s a tough issue with a lot of clients. Because I know, most of my clients are just barely computer literate. They know enough to know that they need a website, they need a domain name. And relying on them to handle those types of accounting issues is high-risk. But then again, I also don’t want to be the guy that has to renew these forever. My sister in law has a couple of companies and I manage all of her stuff. Because I know that it’s going to not get renewed if nobody else does. So it’s a tough situation for a lot of clients to be in because they simply don’t think about it.

44:50
Bill: Unfortunately, if you lose your domain, you lose your email, you lose everything. And we’re all constantly looking at our websites and adding Wordfence and all the security on our sites. And we’re concerned about somebody hacking into the site. Well, you should actually be more concerned about the domain’s security and making sure that everything’s up to date, and who has access, two-factor authentication. Right now, the best way to lock down your domain, I can tell you and from my experience of all these stolen domains and issues, is to actually use a physical key. And YUBIKEY — Y-U-B-I-K-E-Y. YUBIKEY offers a USB key, also a Bluetooth and NFC chip with their physical devices, and Google advanced protection.

46:01
You can lock down your Google account. And you can buy a YUBIKEY for $50, and you get a USB, NFC chip, and a USB key. And basically, any authenticator app, you can add that YUBIKEY to. So essentially, when you log in to a registrar that offers the authenticator app, you can be required to put in your USB key into your laptop, or press the button on your Bluetooth device, this little thing that goes on your keyring to be able to log in. And you can connect those to any authenticator app, like Authy, or Google Authenticator, and so forth. And so that’s the extra protection.

46:59
With GoDaddy, I understand, and several registrars, they only offer the 2FA, which is either send you an email that could be compromised or send a text message, and that text message also can be compromised. So that’s really the only way is with those physical keys to lockdown. If you’re managing any Google Ads accounts, you’re connected through a Google ad, your Google account, Google advanced protection, $50 and they’ll send you those USB keys, and the Bluetooth and NFC chip. And they do some additional behind the scenes. They do some additional things. Like there are certain apps that they will not allow you to connect to your Google account because of the fact that they’re not secure enough.

48:03
And so they look at your IP address more. So that’s what all the Google employees are using or given; these YUBIKEYs. That’s what I have all my Google accounts on. And it’s been great. I have not had any issues for a couple of years. My son, who does gaming and so forth, and he is a counselor, has compromised his Google accounts over the years. And he said you know what, we’re doing the YUBIKEY, and we have not had any issues.

48:46
Doc: Good to know. That’s an interesting stuff, Bill. And definitely, some things to be aware of and concerned about. Yeah, I agree 100% with what you’re saying, that it seems foolish to worry about your site getting hacked when you could have the ownership of your site totally taken away from you – that needs some attention.

49:09
Bill: And if there is an issue, even if you have control, best-case scenario, you’re getting your domain back in two or three days, which can be a hassle for an outage. Worst case scenario, we’re talking about six months to a year or more. We’re still dealing with legal issues from subdomains that way.

49:33
Doc: So if you’ve got 100 employees and your payroll, your cash flow is tight. That can put a company under, real quick.

49:40
Bill: Yes, exactly. It has.

49:44
Steve: All right, wow. That’s a lot of information. Obviously, we could run these for hours and go deeper and deeper into this. I think the most important thing we need to get everybody to understand is just how important thinking about security is all the way through the process.

50:03
Bill: Yeah, security. And really, it comes down to SEO. As I mentioned, your domain name does matter. And it’s something that can cause somebody to click or not click on the search result. So click through ratios, where people talk about that related to SEO and rankings and so forth, and all that. So your domain name does matter, and it’s all connected, it’s all interwoven into SEO, digital marketing, and domains and so forth.

50:46
Doc: Absolutely.

50:47
Steve: All right. Well, I think we should wrap it here. We’re racing towards an hour now. I think what we’ll do is, like with Kim Krause, there are always new developments coming down the pipe in these areas. And we may have to circle back around here in six months or so and kind of see where we’re at. So thank you again, Bill. It’s been wonderful having you here. I’ve taken a whole page of notes because there’s always something to learn. I hope everybody else enjoys the show. And if you have any questions, reach out to Bill or you can reach out to me and Doc and we can reach out to Bill; however you want to do this. So thank you very much. And we’ll talk to you again soon.

51:34
Doc: Thanks, Bill. It was very informative.

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