An Update To “Domain Names - A Profitable Business”
Whoever said that life is a never ending learning process must have been a very wise man (or woman)!
A couple of days back I wrote a post about domain squatting (what it’s about, a bit about how it’s done, how it can affect you and how important it is that you don’t disregard your renewal notices).
It turns out there’s more to that than I thought there was. I won’t waste anyone’s time by talking about something that has been (in my opinion) quite well covered by somebody else.
Bellow is an article from SEO Chat about domain tasting and kiting, two posts belonging to two different bloggers who had to personally deal with it and an article from Business Week.
Before I let you click away from this page I would like to share what I understood from the whole situation. It seems as if there’s companies who have the technology that allows them to gather information about domain names people would like to register. Long gone are the days when they would only target expired domains or combinations and mispellings of existing ones.
This is how I research about a certain name I am interested in: I directly type the URL in the browser’s address bar and see what comes up. If nothing does, I suppose that domain name has not been registered yet and place my order for it. It has so far worked. Maybe not the most “scientific” way of doing it, but it has met my needs so far and kept me from going through what others are experiencing.
Some folks try a different approach (which actually is the normal one). They check the availability of a domain name through one of the registrars out there. This, somehow, triggers the tasters’ systems and they grab these names so fast, that, by the time the original buyer places his/her order, it’s already taken. Quite sneaky. Some go as far as suspecting the registrars of some fishy business with the squatters.
One more thing I want to pin point. It’s said all over the net that you should invest in purchasing your own domain name. There’s the general accepted reasons for this: a professional image; the limitations imposed by a free host; in case your site becomes popular, and you finally decide to get your own domain name, you loose traffic and your rankings with the search engines as the inbound links from all over the web point to your old “mysite.freehost.com” and it’s that site that ranks high in the search engines (in other words you would have to start everything all over again). But, if you read the articles bellow you shall see there’s another reason why you should invest in your own domain name: if your web site becomes popular (and, for example, gets featured on one of the major news channels - world wide or locally) the next day, the “mysite” in your “mysite.freehost.com” will, most likely, be registered by one of the domain name squatters. In many instances not just the .com, but .net and probably others as well.
But I promissed I won’t go into details. I’ll let you learn about it from others:
- Domain Tasting - Hard to Swalow
- Maltuzi Holdings
- The Great Internet Brand Rip-Off
- Another post about Maltuzi Holdings LLC.
I suggest you read the comments to see just how many folks have to suffer from this, I said it before and I’ll say it again, dishonest business.
P.S. In case you don’t have the patience to read the comments, here’s another thing worth mentioning. It seems as if one guy paid to have a domain name registered under his name. For some unkown reasons the registration didn’t go through (although the registrar charged him). He was told to wait. Needless to say, while the situation was investigated and a solution was sought, the name had been snatched by one of our beloved businesses. He’s actually the first one to raise the suspicion of some sort of “fishy practices” on behalf of the registrars.
