www.britphoto.us will become www.tehisp.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks. www.britinthe.us will become www.britishphotography.blogspot.com in a couple of weeks also. This change has been perpetuated by Name.Com requesting more than double the domain name fee. When the domains were purchased in 2013 they were $3.99 each which is why I bought two and why I bothered with domain names. Now Name.Com wants a ludicrous $10.99 each. As these two are purely blogs, there seems singularly little point in paying $10.99 for each blog domain name. I can get along quite satisfactorily without them. Certainly many of my old links won't work any more but who really truly cares?
As far as I am concerned, $10.99 is better in my pocket than in somebody else's. As far as I know, I have 3 domains due to expire between the beginning of July and the end of October. One is a domain I know I don't use. The other two are domains that I use but could quite happily live without. They have all risen to $10.99 so that means I now have $32.97 available for use on such frivolous things as groceries.
Are domain names really needed? These days with the speed of a Google search, I don't really believe they are. I notice that all the things that I have done to help my blogs to become popular have all backfired badly. I used domain names that were short and easy to remember so that people could access the blogs easily. Those could actually be the salvation of this blog. When I started it, I had no blog entries. Thus I wanted to make it easy to find. Now I have plenty content so online searches should be finding the content. They're not finding it that often at the moment. I suspect because there are too many links going to and fro. I'm not sure that all this linking is a good thing.
As with everything, look online and one writer swears by one technique and another by a different technique. None of the techniques tried so far have gained a single extra visitor. I've acquired a load of bots visiting but that's all. I'm going thus to call bullshit on all of the SEO techniques and popularisation techniques and just say that content is king. I have very much a feeling that Google searches have largely made domain names entirely redundant.
In a way, losing the domain names is a bonus as not only does it save me money but it also kills off all the linkbacks. I'm leaning toward the philosophy that my blogs should not be found as blogs but as individual articles. After all, when I hunt online, I look at individual articles. I don't pick a blog and read every post. I pick the articles that come up in an online search and read those articles if they interest me. To my mind, hit generation created by pasting the links to your blog are the most worthless kinds of hit creation. Instead, paste links to individual articles. That way the search universe runs the way it should.
Domain names, SEO and all that malarkey are, in my opinion very much over-hyped. My blog hit numbers dived after I dumped all the "popularisation" widgets. Income rose despite the fact each page now has fewer viewers. I notice a great number of hits from some of the camera discussion websites. Interestingly, those hits do not correspond to income. That's another darned good reason to dump the domain names. I'd rather have meaningful hits than meaningless hits. I can't make every hit a paying hit but I can eliminate the fake hits. I suspect that camera forums just generate fake hits - probably as the camera forums own search engine indexes my site as it searches its own site. I think I'd rather have people that find my blog through searches than people that just blindly follow links. That way I should get people who're more interested in what I have to say.
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