Five Places to Find Great Domain Names

One of the biggest - and most fun - parts of launching a new site is coming up with the domain name. This is it - this is going to be your identity on the Web for the foreseeable future, and it’s important to get it right the first time. Sometimes the decision’s made for you - you go with the name of your business or something like that. That’s fine. But other times, you’re presented with the unique challenge of coming up with an online identity from scratch. On those occasions, here are five tools to help you come up with great domain names.

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I had someone write me in a panic the other day. They had just switched their Web site between servers, only to watch their search traffic plummet from Google. In the week after they switched, they went from about 150 unique visitors from Google to just 20. What was the problem?

I went through a quick checklist with the site’s owner, checking to see if he may have been penalized by Google or if there was a problem with his site. Did he start selling links on his site, or was his site hacked? No, so a penalty was unlikely. Did he delete or change the links to his content? No, so errors weren’t the cause. So the only explanation left was the mythical Google sandbox effect.

Web developers are in disagreement as to whether the sandbox actually exists, and it has never been confirmed or denied by Google. I’m a firm believer in the sandbox effect’s existence, at least for certain sites. What is it and how can you escape it? Read on.

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