Watching a little TV last night and I saw a commercial by American Express® about their online service called AcceptPay™ that allows its users to electronically invoice customers and accept online payments. The interesting thing to me was American Express did not display the domain name AcceptPay.com in a dominate place in the ad.

The odd part was, they did display the domain in a disclaimer type format that I happened to see, but I know not that many people would have really seen it. I was looking specifically for the domain name placement in the ad.

So American Express owns the domain name and they even have a stand alone site created on the domain name for the service they offer, so why not show the domain name in a dominate position in the ad? I mean, they did include the domain in the ad but it was pretty much hidden really.

Doing some research for this article, a couple things jumped out at me that did surprise me a bit and may be why they didn’t include the domain in the ad that stuck out more.

The site does not rank in Search Engines very well, if at all!

The domain name was created in 2007, but has ZERO indexed pages at Google. With zero indexed pages, this also means that the site will not rank for any search terms unless it is a paid ad. Yahoo does have 5 indexed pages but the site ranks very poorly for the "exact match search term". On a bright note, Bing.com has 138 indexed pages for AcceptPay.com and the site ranks #1 for the matching search term. The bad thing, Bing only has about a 5% market share for online searches.

American Express does use online advertising at all 3 major search engines for search terms like AcceptPay, AcceptPay.com, Online Invoices and I’m sure more.

The site appears to have been created about 2/11/2010 so I am not sure why Google is giving no love to the site. The site does have "Google Verification" code added, so Google should be well aware of it. Since Google holds about 70% of the search engine market, a site owner should put a good deal of focus on getting indexed and ranking well in Google.

Nothing jumped out at me that would prevent AcceptPay.com from ranking at Google or that would make it "blacklisted" for something like duplicate content. AE is using the exact match domain name, which is very important. Several of the basic SEO things are used and in place etc.

The only thing that may be an issue, is the site uses another domain name PaySimple.com for the login of the service as AcceptPay.com is "Powered By" Pay Simple.

Domain wise, American Express is doing the right thing with AcceptPay.com but really needs to place the domain name in a dominate position in its ad and needs to figure out why the site / domain is not getting indexed in Google. They may not even know the site / domain is not indexed but they should be able to tell by looking at referring stats. Google is a large provider of traffic to many sites, but the site needs to be indexed to get natural traffic.