Hey domainers! Here’s the question, how do you keep track of your domain names?
Around here it gets a little crazy at times. We intermittently go from writing, to checking stats, to email, to twitter, to news groups, to writing, to posting, to checking stats, to reading, to skypeing, to downloading, to pugins, to themes, to writing, and on and on… You do too, tell the truth.
Domaining Tools:
In between all of the above, every now and then a brainy idea pops up and we go looking at domain name availability on various subjects. Some of the tools that we keep in a bookmarked folder are NAME.com, pcnames.com, NameBoy.com, justdropped.com, wegotdomain.com, archive.org, and our favorite hosting company, BlueHost.
With all of those tools opened in tabs across the top of the screen one is able to jump from one possible resource to the other to try to snap up a real cool name.
Now none of this is a problem if you have a handful of domains to worry about, but what if you have many hundreds of them as we do, or even many thousands as some serious domaniers do? It gets confusing.
DataBase Management:
For instance I have a database with domain name ideas for future search that I just put fleeting thoughts in to, until such time as I get geared up to go domaining. Then there is another database with all of the domains owned, activated, where hosted, and where some are parked earning paltry sums of revenue sharing, and some are just plain dormant which sometimes leaves me wondering, what the hell was I thinking?
Sonoma Wine Country:
So my daughter is living in the Sonoma wine country and as I have a very popular New York State Wine website, she decided that she would like to set one up for Sonoma wine. Great !
So a couple of weeks ago I started to search for some cool names that might work good for a California wine website, found a half-dozen or so, and wrote them down in my notebook. I checked them on pcnames. All were available. Great !
Purchase Domains Today:
So today I went to NAME.com which is where I always purchase names in bulk. I have never found anyplace any cheaper. It is a little bother to point the DNS servers to your hosting companies, but it is not difficult and after a couple of days you can set up the website.
Well anyway, of the six names that I wanted to buy, every single one of them was now unavailable. some no-good-dirty-rotten-scoundrel had beaten me to them! Hmm does pcnames monitor searches?
So I said something like, shucks (ok not what I said,) and started looking for some possible alternatives. I found a couple that would work and went back to NAME.com and bought them. Then when I signed in and took a look at all of the names I own on NAME I was shocked to see that I was that no-good-dirty-rotten-scoundrel ! LOL !
I had indeed purchased all of those other names a couple of weeks ago and did not enter them into the database. I have absolutely no memory of doing so. Now I’m wondering how many more I own at a half dozen or so various registrars I have used.
How about you? Has anything like this ever happened to you? Do you have a “System” that you could share with us?
This has nothing to do with ICANN the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, but they certainly ought to be involved in a major policy change.
The domain of the very popular website MakeUseOf.com has been STOLEN! This was reported by Daniel Scocco during the night on his Blog DailyBlogTips.com.
The report says that MakeUseOf was being hosted on GoDaddy and that GD allowed the domain to be transfered away from the owner to somewhere in Dubai. GoDaddy no doubt will cover their ass by saying all security terms were met, but I say Bull Shit! Get better security terms!
How can this happen? MakeUseOf has over 20,000 subscribers, I being one, and we all enjoy the tips and free information given out contiuously be MakeUseOf.
This is a Nightmare, a Horror Story fitting for the Halloween season for sure, but sadly true and how will it be resolved?
What would you do if your baby was stolen and taken to a foreign country?
This industry needs better security methods similar to what the online banking industry uses such as, multiple security codes, a primary image associated with the account, two security questions, a mouse pointer select keyboard, and anything else that someone could come up with.
I did notice that one method being offered by some registrars is to limit activity to a specific IP address. That way transfers could only come from one specific computer. That seem like a good idea to me, what do you think?
For now you should make sure that you use DIFFERENT passwords for all of your domains, your administration panels, your hosting company accounts, and so on. Use multiple email addresses for different accounts.
What do you think? Can anyone come up with ideas on how to make this more secure. Lets talk about it. This HAS to be fixed.
Come on GoDaddy, fix this and return MakeUseOf to the rightful owner.
Rich Hill
UPDATE - UPDATE - UPDATE:
MakeUseOf has a temporary home on blogger until this gets fixed. go there and give them your support.
First off, this is about me, but I do NOT do any of the aforementioned things.
However I made a major snafu recently, late at night, that has changed my latest plan to become the next Kevin Rose.Hmm, wonder if he ever did?
Any way here’s what happened.I had this idea of setting up a social circle, you know friends helping friends, wink, wink.Sort of a you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.Well this crashed into a not so happy ending, (pun intended.)
I was going to set up a site where registered mail list members could post their site or article url and then other members would hump it, oops, I mean help promote it with various social networking tools.I wanted a cool name, so during the night I got up thinking about it and said, something like “social.”…Easy to remember….Hmmm…
Eureka!I got it. “sosso dot com”!It’s cute, rhymes sort of with social, easy to remember, and I could get it out as a Buzz word.You know what I mean?
Great!I had just read a Blog about how NAME dot com was the cheapest registrar and so I went there and bought it and a dozen other domains all in one day.Then I read another Blog about how great Hostgator was, and though I have sites on three other domain hosting companies already, I wanted to try out Hostgator.
So I said to myself, self, this is going to be HOT!He he he… Can’t afford a private server, not yet, so I purchased the high end shared account for 13 bucks a month, with the first month only costing a penny.Pretty good deal right?
So I set up sosso dot com as my primary account on Hostgator and then read the instructions on how to point the DNS on NAME dot com to my shiny new hard disks at Hostgator.Did that and saw the warning that this may take 24 to 48 hours to resolve.No problem.It isn’t like I don’t have anything to do in the meantime.
So I checked it the next day and the next day and it still had not resolved.What’s up with that?Forget it, I’m already into a dozen new projects, will fix it later.Well that was August 3, 4 & 5.Now this morning I said I’m going to find out what the Hell is wrong.
I checked sosso again and it was coming up on a GoDaddy parked domain website.Huh?This didn’t have anything to do with GD, or so I thought.I checked again with Hostgator tech support and they said it was NAME’s problem.Checked with NAME but had to wait two and a half hours because they don’t get out of bed until 9am mountain time, and they don’t offer 24/7 phone tech support.
Finally it turns out that I did not OWN sosso.I owned a domain named “sossol.”Naturally I got a little testy and said what do you mean, I registered sosso.So sorry, we only have sossol.
I finally figured out what happened.Remember when I said I did this during the night after I had woken up thinking about it?Take a look at where the “L” key is, right next to the “O” key.I did not purchase the right domain and it was ALL my fault!Turns out GD had registered that name years ago, and it was not even available.
So here’s my point boys and girls.Make absolutely SURE just what you are typing during domain registrations and hosting setups.If you screw up, it can’t be fixed.Now I just went through the procedure of taking sosso off my Hostgator account and setting up a different domain as my primary account.It is mostly done but has been a few hours and there is still a little more BS that I have to do to get the damned thing working.
So point number two is.I did this totally clean, honest!Other than being sleepy I should not have made such a stupid mistake.I wonder what people do that have a few beers before going through this procedure?
Oh well, I only lost about a half a month’s worth of my first penny right?
I’m Rich
(New info: Here is a new website where you can purchase currently owned
Shoemoney posted a blog yesterday about the new TLD .ME to become available on Thursday July 17, 200 at 8:00am Pacific time. I knew that this was going to be happening soon but had not paid much attention to it.
Last night I made a hot list of about a hundred domains that I thought would be really really cool, knowing full well that I would not be buying more that two or three, but Hey I can dream can’t I?
Well naturally even with all best plans to lurk over the keyboard with my finger poised watching the second hand just like on an Ebay snipe, I totally forgot about it. LOL
So about noon Eastern time I signed on to GoDaddy and sure enough the dot ME was being sold. So I started down my list, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, SOLD, etc, etc. You get the idea. Then lo and behold I got one! Then another, then another! What a shock. I’m not going to brag about what they are yet because some of the discussion on Shoemoney was that if domains had multiple requests, they would go in a bidding war.
I don’t know if that bidding war stuff is real or not, I can’t find anything in the fine print, and I did get a receipt and then a confirmation email. Incidentally I used the coupon (gdp0422v - Save 20% off $75 or more.) It saved me over twenty bucks.
You pay $19.99 per year with a two year minimum, so it isn’t exactly a bargain domain name.
What do you think about this new domain name .ME? It is the country domain name for Montenegero, but anyone may purchase one, as far as I know. We reported in a previous post on this Blog about ICANN opening up possibilities for any TLD name that you want. Read about the ICANN Paris announcement on a previous Link Money dot org post.
Can you think of some good .ME names? As I understand it there are no two letter names available, but I did snag a good three letter one.
Would you take a gamble on a dot ME domain name? It might tie up your money for a while and then if the scuttlebut is any where near true, you might even lose it after you have made the purchase. In that case I guess GoDaddy would likely have many millions of dollars in their interest bearing accounts before they have to issue a refund.
Let us know what your thoughts are on the .ME domains.
(Click on comments below.)
Read more on this dot ME Fiasco on another Link Money dot org post.
Do you want to be a Domainer? Or perhaps you just want to do some keyword research on a domain name for your personal Blog. This post will help you.
Do you own a couple or more of domain names that you purchased when you had a brainfart? Do you have several domains parked just waiting for the chance to get the time to set up websites and become the next Darren Rowse?
Well I wish I only had a couple, but truth is I have over a hundred, with only a little over a dozen that are activated and in various states of growth at the moment.
Did you know that there are large numbers of people that invest in domain names? I had suspected so but after searching around a while I was floored with the enormity of this Domaining business. There are worldwide auctions in fancy places that attract the high rollers, the champagne and caviar set, and from the podcast auctions I have heard the former had been liberally doled out.
Here are just a few Domains that sold in 2007 with prices realized; computer.com, Five million dollars, seniors.com 2.1 million, vista.com 1 and a quarter million, guy.com 1 million, ok you say, so what, I’ll never have that chance?
Well how about DIY.net $200K, BoiseIdaho.com $175K, travel.info $116K, bulk.com $100K. It is not exactly too hard to come up with something close that has not yet been purchased. Buy something you think is cool, sit on it a while and offer it for sale. My father always said, “If you double your money, you’ll never go broke.”
Even any commonly used terms, dictionary word one name urls, three or four character urls sell for many thousands of dollars. All of the dot com LLL or LLLLs have been sold, but they do show up in the expired or after market sites quite often. One man last year purchased five LLLs for less than $3,500 from a domain holding company that released them on the aftermarket at a very low price. The blog at www.dailydomainer.com says he could easily sell them for $50K any day! Three years ago I purchased three LLLLs for one of my websites and use two of them as redirects to the first. If I had only known then what I know now I would have purchased as many LLLs and LLLLs that I could afford.
This means that someone was quick on the draw and was able to scoop up these choice names whenever they became available for the first time, or perhaps a few years later when the original owner neglected to renew them. That happened to me once on a domain that I had been using and then had transferred the website over to a nice easy four letter dot com but I had still left the old name active and it pointed to my new site. Well I had moved around several times in a five year period and between postal and email changes the renewal notice never got to me. Next thing I knew the old address was gone and there was nothing I could do about it.
I suppose I could have contacted the new owner and tried to negotiate a repurchase, but as I was only using it as a redirect I decided to heck with it. Lesson learned. It will never happen again.
You all no doubt know that the age of your website, among many other factors, does help to improve your ranking with some of the search engines. So keep track of all your domains and make sure they are renewed far in advance. I keep all of mine in a spreadsheet database and I also keep adding the new purchases as I build this collection.
I look at domain names as falling into two categories, a Brandable Name, and a Keyword Name. Seems like in the early days of the Internet it was a scramble to come up with cute names that might be an acronym of your business name or that just was memorable for its bizarreness. Consider names like YAHOO, GOOGLE, EBAY, There certainly would not be anyone apt to search for those terms, however they have become Brand Names and easy to remember. Google has even become a verb!
Then we come to the type that many people look for today, as being search engine friendly. For instance you want the Keyword or Keyword Search Phrase to be built right into the domain name. Some of the search engines use the url line in the search algorithm and then the title bar of the website’s internal pages becomes an associated part of the search strength. For instance www.LookingForMr.com might be followed by Blog page headers of Goodbar, or Handsome, or Right, or Fixit. The words in the title pages become what are called the Long Tail Search Words.
The domain name and the long tail are not the only factors involved in having your site found, there is of course content, links in, social bookmarking, Buzz, and many other details, but the names do help. Oh, and did I mention content?
If you are a Blogger in the world of Internet marketing or niche marketing specifically, then it would most likely behoove you to purchase a domain name that might be easily related to the product that you are humping and certainly if you can get the product theme in the url line than that is a plus.
Let me tell you the procedure I use to investigate the availability and the possible demand for certain terms that might make a good domain name. Others no doubt have their own method, but this works for me.
I use a pc almost exclusively with Firefox. Other computers and browsers might have some or all of these features available, but I do not know about them. Firefox allows you to add many different tools or utilities that they call Addons. One of the newer Addons that you can install on Firefox is LinkBun.ch (note the TLD of ch) and what this tool does is to allow you to open up as many tabbed websites that you wish and then create one LinkBun.ch bookmark. That way the next time you want to open that same series of websites all at once is to go to your bookmarks and open that one LinkBun.ch. It is still in Beta but I have not found any flaws in it, other than you have to say yes about an annoying three times to get it to open. Still pretty cool.
If I already have an idea for a good name and want to see if it is available I go right to pcnames. This one has a block where you just start typing the name in and pcnames lets you know if any of the names are available instantly right as you are typing in characters. So I just used the example above; lookingformr and started typing them in. As I got to “looking” all are taken, but org and biz are for sale, then as soon as I started adding additional characters, “f” & “o” available, “lookingfor” are all taken but org and info are for sale, then added the “mr” and surprise! They are all available! The dot com, net, org, info, biz and us are the TLDs that pcnames returns. They do qualify the results by saying that the data might not be entirely up to date, but I have only seen one time that I went to register a domain that pcnames said was open to find that it had been already registered.
Another nice feature with pcnames is that if the website is taken there is a WHOIS button right there so you can check and see who the owner is. Normally the owners are cloaked behind a privacy shield, but sometimes you can find the name and address of an actual owner.
Before I register the name I check the keyword url in wordtracker and Google within quotes. That will give you some idea of the popularity of that specific search phrase. If no one or very few people ever search on that phrase then I do not buy it.
Freshdrop.net – TDNAM Closeouts are names that have been in service before. Many have fair Google Page Rank, age and traffic. These dropped names usually have just recently expired and the registrar gives you a chance to pick up a domain with some ready made juice. There is a filter box where you can select any number of TLD’s or all if you want. Here you can register a great many TLDs that you normally do not see at most domain registries. For instance besides the customary dot com, net, org, biz, info and us, you can also search for dropped dot mobi, tv, name, cc, ws, de, am and fm.
The filter box also lets you put other limiters in your search, such as starts with, contains, ends with, insert a number for minimum GPR, select whether the GPR might be fake or not, and insert a minimum age in years.
I generally look for names that have a minimum GPR of 2, age of 2, not fake, [mykeyword] and am often surprised that there is something right down my alley for a mere five bucks! There is no guarantee that the page rank or any juice will follow you when you revive this turkey, but hey the age has to be a plus factor.
I suspect that GoDaddy is behind just about everything here, but I don’t know that for sure. Every time I have registered from Freshdrop it has been GoDaddy on the other end of the line. Oh by the way you will have to register through GD to obtain an annual TDNAM account to be able to purchase any of these TDNAM domains. As I recall it was less than five bucks for the annual renewable account. The other thing is that in addition to the $5 purchase you have to pay an additional $9.95 for a one year registration fee, plus .20 ICANN fee, so it’s a little over fifteen bucks for this baby.
There is another section called “Exp Names,” these are expired and available at auction. The minimum bid is usually fairly low, and you can see the number of bids on each domain name. You could get lucky and pick up something that you could promote for as little as $10, however they usually sell for a bit more, sometimes in the hundreds.
There is also a section for SEDO Auction, Ebay, Afternic and others, but they almost all sell in much higher prices and I only look for bottom of the barrel bargains. I know that it would be smarter to purchase a better name, but I can’t afford it on a gamble and I know for sure I can do something with the low priced names I do get. This Freshdrop site reportedly gets updated on an hourly basis.
If you want to see what the website used to look like before, that’s where I use the page that we opened with LinkBun.ch for www.archive.org. This site has a feature called “The Wayback Machine,” and you can see what the site used to look like at various dates in the past. You should keep that in mind when you plan on restarting this domain. Will its previous iteration help you or be a hindrance?
GoDaddy also operates a site at www.tdnam.com where you can purchase high priced domain names. I see things like cavemenblogs.com being offered for $50K minimum, theguypage.com with one bid at $35K, adsensewebsites.com for $950, and so on. Oh you can pick up the bargain presedenthillaryclinton.com for a mere $1,000, note the misspelling, but hey what about 2012?
Why would you buy these and then not do anything with them, you might ask? Well I do intend to use every one of them eventually. There are just too many things going on in my life to keep installing new websites every day. So what I do is park them. Some places charge you a monthly fee for parking, like GoDaddy, but I park mine at namedrive.com for free.
That way a fake website is created with that url and it looks like a website full of information, but they are all ads. Well if someone blunders on to that site and clicks any of the ads or makes a purchase, then you get a share of the advertising revenue. Hey I would rather get a couple of bucks every once in a while, then to just keep them hidden. I doubt the website gains any ranking but it should qualify as helping in the ageing of the website. Then when you do want to get it set up all you have to do is transfer it back and install your website.
Just as much as GD is no doubt the best known and I do register many domains with them, they are not my favorite. I think that BlueHost is the very best hosting company out there, particularly for customer support. So I quite often pay ten bucks for a domain through BlueHost just because I like this company so much.
Very big changes are coming and I have no idea, nor have I read any of the experts predictions yet, but the Domaining world is about to change within the next couple of years. ICANN this year at the Paris meeting voted to allow any type of name to be registered. You can create any kind of new TLD by paying $100,000 to ICANN and then you can become the registrar for the millions of urls that will be set up under what ever you selected. Lets say you wanted dot movie, or dot Ford, or dot catpoop, whatever. A hundred K and it’s yours! The buzz is that this will come into effect about 2010.
I have a hunch that dot com will still reign supreme for a long time to come. (Oh and by the way if you register the above www.LookingForMr.com please let me know.)
Annotated Terms used in this post:
BlueHost – Ten bucks to register a name, but the very best company to deal with in the way of tech support and ease of use of their website features, in my humble opinion. The hosting that they provide has many free features that comes with it where other companies charge you extra for them, like a shopping cart, large quantities of email addresses, and others. DNS – Domain Name Service – this is the service that converts your readable character domain name into an IP Address like 208.22.38.109, or what ever your name converts to. Domain – The name of the url Domainer – a person that owns several domains, either for eventual use or to hold for resale at a later date. GoDaddy – Domain name registrar and hosting company. They are probably the cheapest registrar. Their website is very confusing and they are always trying to sell you something more. I have nothing personally against GD other than the confusion I previously mentioned, however as I was writing this today on the Fourth of July one of the Blogs that I subscribe to in my reader, webmaster-source.com, came out with a story about horror stories with this registrar/hosting company. You might want to read it and come to your own conclusions. http://tinyurl.com/5dmmoc GPR - Google Page Rank. ICANN – Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. LLL – any three letter domain name. LLLL – any four letter domain name. TLD – Top Level Domain (like com, org, net, etc.) TDNAM – The Domain Name After Market. URL – Universal Resource Locater. WHOIS - A place to look up the name and contact address for the owner of a domain. Most are hidden behind a cloaking registrar site, but several will have the actual name and address of the owner.
OK readers, here comes my personal request. If you have found this article of interest, or helpful in any way, I REALLY would appreciate some feedback, comments, links in, social bookmarks, or any type of input at all. This is a fairly new website and I really need to get some traffic. Thanks. Rich Hill
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