Archive for March, 2011

Final update: 4,000 WHOIS Queries

Posted by Acro in Business, Domains on March 27th, 2011

I promised I’d come back with the final results of an extraordinary WHOIS onslaught to one of my domains.

The domain has very little traffic otherwise, about 45 uniques in the past 30 days and it’s parked at Sedo. I only had one offer for it in the past.

However, it seems that it made the top tier in various drop-catching lists, due to its quality keywords, or perhaps due to some obsessive list operator.

I let the domain go into expiration for a week, during which time the WHOIS queries jumped to a little over 4,000 total. That is truly extraordinary as I don’t own any other domain that reached 4-figures in WHOIS queries that I’m aware of.

To those of you that are curious to know the name of the domain: MovieFolio.com

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US PPC Companies giving the shaft to Europeans

Posted by Acro in Business, Domains on March 22nd, 2011

While I’m sipping my second sweet Nescafe of the evening – a must in this cold and windy Athenian weather – I can’t but marvel at the duplicity of the Internet.

It seems that for some US-based companies and services, the focus is the US and very little outside of the 50 US states.

Earlier today I punched in some of my domains still at Parked.com; while it’s true that my Parked.com portfolio has been almost eradicated I still maintain a few there, for experimental purposes.

The majority of my parked domains are with Sedo, which maintains a corporate footprint on both the US and Europe.

And that’s what sets Sedo apart from other parking companies.

Long story short: when viewed from Greece, many of my domains at Parked.com displayed no ads; instead, the message “No Results match your query” appeared.

Surely, this can’t be right, particularly when Parked.com boasts several hundred tweakable templates for every keyword imaginable.

Upon contacting support, I was told to check again. This time around, a couple of ads appeared but they were totally unrelated to the templates and keywords used by these domain names.

The ever-friendly Parked.com support let me know that “Bing/Yahoo does not currently accept traffic from the Greek market, so the ads are coming from secondary feeds.”

I also checked several domains parked at Sedo and didn’t notice any such anomaly; in fact, the majority of the ads that appeared were in Greek and related to the keywords used for that domain.

In a nutshell: your European traffic might not be worthy to US companies, such as Bing which will then display nothing at all, thus failing to monetize your visitors. I would definitely recommend using Sedo for that matter, as they appear to have a better policy and implementation of traffic monetization.

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Fabulous.com – It’s not simply a registrar, it’s a religion!

Posted by Acro in Business, Domains on March 14th, 2011

While onto the 3rd year of using Fabulous.com as my primary domain registrar, I can’t but praise the Australian company for their efficiency and support.

Fabulous.com offers paramount domain security and they are proud of their ability to offer the famous Fabulous fob, which I enjoyed reviewing a while back.

The dedication with which Fabulous.com addresses customer issues was not restricted to legendary Mike Robertson, who has since moved on to form Domain Guardians.

Two days ago I had a special request about a custom report on my 2010 transactions at Fabulous and after emailing my account manager I hoped for a response that would not take longer than 3-4 business days. It’s tax time once again and accurate presentation of data to Uncle Sam is crucial.

To my pleasant surprise, Fabulous.com sent me a detailed report the following day, despite the 12-odd hours of time difference between them and US East Coast.

I could not be happier with this speedy response and once again I’d like to recommend Fabulous.com to any domainer that is serious about using a solid domain registrar for their domain portfolio.

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Update: 2,500 WHOIS Queries

Posted by Acro in Business, Domains on March 4th, 2011

A little over a month ago I posted about how a domain name that I own received 2,500 WHOIS queries at the Registrar, Fabulous.com

In a nutshell, Fabulous.com keeps track of the number of WHOIS lookups for domains registered with them and lists those numbers alongside the domain’s expiration date, inside your account control panel.

It’s obvious that domains that are looked up the most are usually monitored for pending availability by third parties and are entered into a number of droplists.

My little experiment so far has piled another 450 WHOIS queries to the original 2,500 – all while the domain expires in 15 days from now. Originally, I planned to wait almost 3 months before posting an update here but I thought it’d be better to keep track of this milestone as well.

The bottom line: vultures are always out there checking out your best and most valuable domains; it’s great that Fabulous.com provides this type of information that can help you gauge the value of your domain names – and a reminder to renew them well in advance!

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