May 14th, 2008 - 
2 Comments »
The best way to sell a domain is having an end user approach you for it. But what's the best way to deal with such an enquiry? Recently, there was a good discussion about this at DomainState which is well worth reading.
May 12th, 2008 - 3 Comments »
If you host any of your websites at iPowerweb Host, you should quickly check to make sure that they are alright. Thousands of iPowerweb clients have files and directories on their websites that they did not place there. These files and directories seem both to spam Google with unwanted links and some try to download potentially harmful files. Of course, these files will quickly harm your website's SERPs.
You can see the extent of the damage by doing a search on Google for "4some girls" with quotes. You'll see website after website with a nonsense subdirectory name, such as "jqywy" with hundreds of spammy pages under it, all on reputable websites. See the screenshots below.
If you look at the homepage of the sites listed in the screenshots above, you can see that they are all legitimate businesses. However, they all have a subdirectory dealing with 4some girls, 4some lesbians, etc.
Looking further, all of these websites use as nameservers ns1.securehostserver.com and ns2.securehostserver.com, which appear to be owned by iPowerweb.
It's not clear at this point how these directories got there - whether this is a result of a massive hack of iPowerweb's accounts, or whether this was placed there directly by iPowerweb.
May 4th, 2008 - 1 Comment »
As previously reported, Pool has started a one premium domain at a time auction format. The first domain it auctioned was cafe.ca. Unfortunately, this domain did not sell, as it did not meet the reserve price. The next domain they are auctioning is slots.ca, which is also an extremely good domain. If you are interested in bidding on this domain, simply backorder the domain with Pool before noon EST on May 7, 2008.
The MyID auction has announced a new bonus for both its purchasers and its sellers. For every $10 spent by purchasers or received by sellers, you receive an "at-cost credit." What's an at-cost credit? Basically, it allows you to register, transfer or renew a domain at the cost that MyID pays CIRA - currently, $8.50. So, for instance, if you buy or sell a domain for $1,000, you would get 100 domain renewals for only $850. This is a substantial savings - representing 15% to 30% off what the cheapest registrars charge. For domainers with large portfolios, this is an extremely good deal - and hopefully will payoff in higher bids across the board. Start saving your pennies for the auction! The list of domains to be auctioned will be published by May 8, 2008.
April 30th, 2008 - 1 Comment »
I recently did an interview with Michael of Domain Magnate. You can read it here.
Thanks a lot! And make sure to add Domain Magnate to your feed reader.
April 24th, 2008 - 11 Comments »
There are many ways to sabotage a website, but today I found out that one of my websites was sabotaged in a way that I had never seen before.
A few months ago, I started a new, content-rich website. It included about 100 articles. Like I often do with a new website, I got a few backlinks to the site, then left it to age a few months before seriously promoting it.
Today I returned to that website to find it had some serious ranking and indexing problems in Google. I tried to figure out what was going on and found that someone had used a very creative way of sabotaging the website.
What this person had done was take almost every single article from my website, and submitted them to many article directories. However, the articles were submitted with his byline and with a link to his websites! Since then, many other websites had syndicated these articles from the article banks - and all of these syndicated articles were linking to his websites.
Now, it looks to Google like my website is simply a copy of free articles available in article directories, with little original content. In short - little original content = not worth indexing or ranking. What's more, this person's website is getting credit for all of these articles, as most of the copies on the web are linking to his website.
Normally, I don't care much if someone copies from my websites. I think Google is pretty smart about it, and as long as your content is cached first, you should be alright most of the time. However, in this case, with so many copies of most of the articles from my website, and all of them attributing authorship to someone else, it's a big problem. It's an even bigger problem for brand new websites (like mine) as these sites will not yet have earned much trust or authority in Google.
I can't think of what I can do about this other than start from scratch, which is very disheartening (and expensive). If anyone has any thoughts about how to deal with this, I'd appreciate the input. And of course, in the future, I will be more vigilant about checking for people copying my websites.
April 22nd, 2008 - 7 Comments »
I've said before that IDNs are going to do well simply because even if people know English fluently as a second language, they prefer to use their native tongue when using the internet. Now an extreme example of the importance of IDNs has just surfaced - because IDNs weren't available, two people died and three people are in jail.
The story reads like something from the twilight zone. A couple in Turkey split up and the wife had moved back in with her family. The couple were text messaging each other. The wife's cell phone didn't have IDN capabilities - and could not read or write the closed i or "ı". So, the letter i showed in place of the closed i.
As the article states:
The use of "i" resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word "sıkısınca" it looked like he wrote "sikisince." Ramazan wanted to write "You change the topic every time you run out of arguments" (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, "You change the topic every time they are fucking you" (sounds familiar too.)
Wife then shows father the message, father accuses husband of treating wife as a prostitute, husband show's up at father's house to apologize, is greeted by the father and several family members wielding knives, husband is stabbed and seriously injured (later kills himself), husband takes knife that stabbed him and uses it to stab his wife, dad and two family members are now in jail.
Not only do IDNs save lives, IDNs are what people want and need. Buy 'em while they're still affordable.
April 22nd, 2008 - 4 Comments »
I do recommend investing in IDNs - but only when appropriate. Appropriate means good commercial and similar terms in languages that use more than just English's 26 letters of the alphabet. However, domains that are simply English words, replacing a vowel such as an "i" with an "ì" are worthless. Their only possible value is for phishing.
Yesterday while browsing Sedo, the auction of Office.net caught my attention. I wanted to place a bid, but because the bidding was so low for what is such a great domain, I hesitated. If a deal is too good to be true, it probably is.
Upon further investigation, I found out that the domain on auction was actually offìce.net. What's the difference? Look closely - it's an "ì" rather than an "i" in office. I wonder if the winning bidder noticed that and whether the transaction will actually close. There is absolutely nothing on the auction to alert a person that this is an IDN - Sedo should surely have also written something like: in punycode, this is xn--offce-vsa.net.
Come on Sedo - how hard is it to alert people to deceptive practices like this? You are supposed to be providing a much safer and more sophisticated domain platform than places like eBay.
April 22nd, 2008 - 11 Comments »
There have been some notable changes over the last few days in the Canadian domain auction landscape.
Sibername has introduced changes in their TBR system. First, they have raised the minimum bid from $15 to $25. While I'm sure domainers will complain about the increase in price (after all, who wants to pay more?), I believe that this is a good step. My guess is that Sibername was wasting a lot of resources trying to catch dropping domains that would only sell for $15, when these resources could have been reallocated to catching higher value domains. For $15, they are better off selling new registrations than TBR domains.
April 20th, 2008 - 2 Comments »
Have you ever bothered to read the fine print in the agreement you entered into with your registrar? Chances are you haven't, and quite honestly, until now, nor have I. Well, for some weekend fun, I decided to do this. Here's what I found that my registrar was guaranteeing:
April 17th, 2008 - No Comments »
I'm offering a top NL.ca for sale - 0b.ca. NL.ca are obviously very rare - there are only 260 of them.
0b has overture of 113. There are 8,590,000 Google results for 0b. It makes a good acronym.
Here are some recent comparable sales (all in 2008):
A7.ca - $1,580
3W.ca - $1,500
X2.ca - $1,495
6X.ca - $1,250
There have also been several five-figure LL.ca sales in 2008. Some of them are:
RR.ca - $15,811
VV.ca - $10,000
BU.ca - $13,500
Prices of .ca domains are rising fast - it has been a record breaking year for .ca domains. Prices will continue to rise, now that we are at the one million .ca mark.
0b.ca will be on auction at the MyID Premium .ca Auction, which starts May 22, 2008. The reserve price is $1,000 (Canadian) and the BIN price is $2,000.
April 16th, 2008 - 3 Comments »
One of my favorite domaining blogs is DotSauce, written by Mark Fulton. One of the things that makes his website special is the premium content section. In this section, he offers additional tools, bookmarks, coupon codes and articles. Normally, he charges a mere $10 per month for this - a real bargain. Now, for a limited time only, you can get free access to the premium content. Well worth signing up and taking a look around at what he offers.
April 14th, 2008 - 5 Comments »
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't force him to drink. You can see this principle in action at an ongoing thread at Domainstate. A chap going by the handle "Ace Brawler" is looking for an appraisal of the term AceBrawler.com. He's told very politely that it's worthless and why. Instead of learning from this, he decides to prove he's worthy of the name "Ace Brawler." Read the ensuing hilarity here. I do hope that the moderators at DomainState don't edit this thread so that in the future, people can learn from this.
On a more serious note, if you ever wonder why no one bothers to give an appraisal in a forum, it's often because they have been burned by this sort of "Ace Brawling" many times before and are tired of it. Kudos to anyone who has the patience to take the time to provide a domain appraisal and give reasons to back it up.
April 14th, 2008 - 1 Comment »
My favorite set of domaining tools is at Estibot. The main tool available is a domain appraisal tool. This tool provides an automatic appraisal of a domain name based on a wide variety of data, including keyword frequency in Google, keyword frequency in urls and titles in Google, backlinks, pagerank, alexa rank, number of ppc ads for the keywords, maximum bids on ppc ads for the keywords, and Overture and Wordtracker data. The tool is also integrated somewhat with NameBio and pulls up similar sales to the domain you are getting appraised.
What's useful about the tool is not so much the final number that is produced (in fact, you'd be very foolish to rely on this), but the fact that it provides you with pretty much all the publicly available pieces of data that you can get about a domain. That way, you can quickly and easily analyze a domain and come to your own conclusion about the data.
Read the rest of this entry » April 12th, 2008 - 15 Comments »
The biggest theme in the domainersphere in the last few days has been about development of domains. Many people are saying that this is the way forward for domainers and the best way to profit from domains. Elliot talks about his ideal portfolio. If you look at the direction he is heading in, he is basically reducing the number of domains he holds in order to concentrate on developing a few successful websites. Lord Brar talks about how he makes money from domains - essentially he develops them before reselling. Over and over we hear about how "pure" domaining is dying, and domainers need to hop on the development bandwagon.
April 9th, 2008 - 4 Comments »
Recently, I called attention to a news article in Gulf News that claimed Paul Twomey, president and CEO of ICANN, made some very negative statements about domaining.
I have since been contacted by Jason Keenan, who works at ICANN media relations. His statement is as follows:
April 8th, 2008 - 12 Comments »
Not content with the profits it makes from front running, Network Solutions has decided to scam people in another way: it is now hijacking unassigned sub-domains.
A subdomain is basically a domain built on a domain - so, for instance, some sites might add a blog at blog.domain.com. An unassigned subdomain is a subdomain that hasn't been set up and there will be an infinite number of them - e.g. NetworkSolutionsSucks.DomainBits.com, EvilNetworkSolutions.DomainBits.com, etc. What Network Solutions is doing is presenting a parking page any time someone goes to a nonexistent subdomain of a website hosted with them.
If these pages ended up getting indexed in Google or any of the other major search engines, it could cause some serious trouble for the website owners. Even if they don't get indexed - how would you like your host to be adding pages to your website, without letting you know?
Network Solutions Sucks - avoid them like the plague!
April 7th, 2008 - 6 Comments »
Paul Twomey is the president and CEO of Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the big kahunas who run the domain system. So, their view of domaining is obviously somewhat important.
Now we hear from Mr Twomey that domaining is bad. In fact, it's not only bad, it's as bad as cybersquatting and typosquatting.
April 3rd, 2008 - 4 Comments »
I'm proud to announce that I've recently acquired the leading domain forum for Indian domains - INForum.
INForum is the place on the internet to discuss Indian domains, their future and their development. You can get your Indian domains appraised, and there is also a marketplace where you can buy and sell your Indian domains. You can also discuss anything related to India's technology revolution or the internet in India. The forum also has a blog, on which I'll post news relating to these topics.
April 1st, 2008 - 7 Comments »
Just acquired a great new domain for my collection - IdiotU.com. Best of all, I didn't even need to pay anything for it. That's right, no cash at all. All I had to do was give this sucker one of my kidneys. Well, I needed to lose weight anyhow, and what a fast way to do it! Can't wait to see how much traffic IdiotU.com gets!
April 1st, 2008 - 4 Comments »
There has been a lot of news lately about domains that involve legal issues. The law regarding domains can be very complex, and often domainers don't understand the consequences of this. To help you deal with these issues, here are 13 things domainers should know about domain law.
