On the Andrew Marr show this morning was a singer I had never heard of - and as I liked his sound I looked him up on Google. Dan Owen's stage name is 'Blues Boy Dan' - and a search brought up website, Facebook page and Twitter presence. The latter seems to be Dan's communication of choice, with plenty of entries. Similarly, Facebook has consistent updates. The website however - and it is top of the SERP - showed signs of neglect. I had thought that I would like to see him live, so I went to the 'gigs' page and got this.
Yep, no gigs after December 2012. Given that he was on the BBC to plug his new single, I thought this odd. So I went back to the social media sites, and sure enough there was a link to 'live' page. Well, let's ignore the fact that the link went to a dead page as I clicked on the 'live' link which took me to a page called 'gig'. But hold on, I thought, this is different to the previous gigs page [shown above].
I then realised that I was now on www.bluesboydanowen and the previous site was www.bluesboydan.co.uk. Hmmm, I thought - 'fansite'? But no, both seemed to be 'official'. You cannot look up ownership details of .co.uk domains [it's a Data Protection Act thing] - but the .com is owned by Contact Privacy Inc of Toronto, Canada - a company that registers sites for folk who wish to protect their privacy.
All in all then, no great mystery or problem with the domains and sites. I would suspect the .co.uk was an early effort from Dan's management - or even him - as it is on a self-build hosting site. I also suspect that as he has become more well known Dan has taken on a manager or agent who has organized the new .com site.
So here's my issue. Dan is obviously a great talent. His management may know their way around the music business - but they don't know much about SEO as the redundant .co.uk is top of the SERP and the .com nowhere. Is it that big a deal? Probably not, the guy's going to be a success anyway - but I just like to see things done right. In this case, it is just as easy as getting it wrong.
