Acro.net - Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

It was in early 2000 when one of my few - back then - domains got hijacked by a Turkish hacker. He picked that particular domain because it’s a very common Greek cussword, shared equally among our eastern neighbors. The domain was registered with Network Solutions, which offered back then an update process via email. With each WHOIS info change, an email was sent out to be acknowledged or denied by the administrative contact.

The problem was its predictability: its format was identical each time, the changes to be made were obvious and the information conveyed was unencrypted. All a hacker had to do - and many did - was to initiate an update via the NetSol web site and then send out a fake email that appeared to come from the administrative contact, authorizing the changes!

Simple and brilliant.

What’s not simple and brilliant is that eight years later other companies continue to make the same mistakes in the way they program authorization of updates in transactions. In a recent scheme, a Sedo seller received an offer for a 3-letter .com domain; the price was agreed upon and consequently he was emailed, being told that the payment had been received and that the domain should be pushed to the buyer’s account.

The email ended up being fake, the perpetrator once again originating from Iran (oh, the surprise!). The scammer simply replicated a response email, sent often by Sedo to the participants of a transaction and spoofed the originating address, thus making the seller believe that the payment had been made. The seller pushed the domain to the scammer’s acount with Moniker. Later on, Sedo notified the seller that no such email had been sent, that the payment was still pending and that the buyer was apparently trying to defraud the seller.

Luckily, the domain was returned due to the strict safety policies of Moniker. It was proved stolen and it was returned to the owner. Sedo must stop sending out these full communication emails; they must simply prompt the parties involved in a transaction to log into their Sedo accounts to perform whatever step is needed. This way, no personal data is disclosed and no spoofing is possible. Sedo must take example from Escrow.com that has streamlined the domain transfer process to the highest degree; if they were also a registrar it’d be the ultimate in domain reselling security. Other options exist, such as Moniker’s escrow (requires the domains to be transferred to Moniker first), Afternic and the newly founded venture EscrowDNS.

It’s important to learn from the lessons of the past, to avoid the anguish in the future.

In yet another hasty move, Sedo has inexplicably begun to remove political domains from its marketplace. It is uncertain how far the pattern searcher reaches, however Carolyn from the support department mentioned that their legal department decided to remove domains that contain the name of the US political candidates, Obama and McCain. I expect that the black-listing filter contains the names of Palin and Biden as well.

Now, I am not an opportunist that’d go around registering dozens of names of every possible combination for the party tickets, like others did. I own two domains, both hand-registered for their brandability value: Obamagram.com and Oreobama.com

Sedo’s email was yet another blow in the face of the growing number of users that choose the Sedo marketplace as a selling platform:

We are writing to inform you that the domains listed below have been suspended from Sedo’s services because this domain(s) is a potential violation of Sedo’s policy against domains that include obscene or illegal subject matter. While Sedo strives to protect our users rights to exercise free speech and maintain a marketplace with a vibrant and diverse collection of domain names, we apologize any inconvenience that this may cause.

It’s definitely ironic to see the words “free speech” and “blacklisted” in the same email. Currently there are dozens if not hundreds of political domains on Sedo’s marketplace so the blacklisting process has just begun.

Time to move your domains to Parked.com or elsewhere.

In my early domaining days I was simply pointing my domains to a web form for visitors with an interest in purchasing, to leave their contact information. This went on for several years and I can easily say I lost several thousand dollars this way. In 2004 I shyly started using the parking service of Sedo.com, slowly adding more names until my account was upgraded to Sedo Pro.

Now, I sometimes have the reputation of an outspoken guy in online forums. That’s true; I will stick to my guns until the battle smoke clears up, but I always strive to be objective and accurate to the circumstances surrounding my point of view.

Sedo’s services and interface have substantially improved over the past four years. They offer a variety of templates with a customizable image and the editing is quick. There are some drawbacks that I should mention first - just to get them out of my system.

• Sedo does not support meta tags, such as description and keywords. It really hurts a domain in the long run, especially one that competes in Google for term relevancy. Sedo made a statement that Google asked them to do that and I simply cannot believe this statement.
• Adding domains is easy as long as the WHOIS info matches that of the account. For the most part, it works well. Sometimes, especially on a Friday afternoon, the domains will be delayed and added to the account the following Monday. Unless that Monday is a public holiday in the US, the UK or Germany.
• Changing the domain keyword is a pain; it takes up to 3 days for that to happen as they are manually approved.
• Google feed. Sometimes payments are extremely low, sometimes they are decent. Fluctuation has earned Sedo the term “yo-yo revenue”.

In mid-2007 I started using Parked.com right at a time that their feature list exploded: Custom templates, full-featured meta tag customization, addition of custom content including images & video. The guys at Parked.com really listen to what domainers need. Did I mention that their keyword parser - the code that splits a domain name into intelligible words - has no close competitor? I fed it the domain NATIONWIDEMORTGAGELICENSINGSYSTEMANDREGISTRY.COM and it properly split it into “Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System And Registry“. By the way, this is my longest domain and it does get type-ins.

Parked.com has some negatives, so I will list them here:

• Yahoo feed seems a bit sketchy after they implemented the “TQ” factor, some oddball quotient that pretends to judge the quality of traffic, awarding accordingly more or less money per click. I branded “TQ” as “Thieving Quotient” and it’s one Yahoo feature I clearly dislike.
• Template flavors seem to alternate unpredictably between single-click and two-click; the former awarding more money per click than the latter.
• Downtime. Sometimes it’s unplanned or with short notice, but it happens more often than necessary. Compensation does occur though.
• Donny’s special attention to all things Parked seems to backfire when criticism reaches a certain critical mass. He just takes things personally and the various such threads, mainly on DNForum.com become true battlefields. Still, he said once he’d buy me a beer so I think he’s a cool guy after all.
• No escrow services.

The things I like about Sedo include their unified approach as a company: nobody takes things personally, they do care about the customers despite certain complaints. They are very cordial on the phone - and trust me, I am not always the most soft-spoken person on a business call. Sedo offers great escrow service that almost never fails to deliver for both parties. Anonymity is implemented but for obvious reasons of not bypassing them, but why would one bypass the security of an affordable escrow service? Once one gets the hang of what keywords work best, it’s easy to change multiple domains via forms. Sedo pages load fast and certain template schemes seem to be really popular with visitors.

The things I like about Parked include the exquisite template customization, ability to add content and images, the intelligent keyword management and the visibility it provides in search engines via the meta tag management. Addition of domains and keyword modification is instant! Customer service is prompt and quick as well.

So, to recap: Sedo or Parked? I use both and it seems that domains that get lots of visits but few clicks at Sedo can be customized and perform well in Parked. One should try both PPC companies and preferably, split their domain portfolio among both. Currently, Sedo has a great geo-auction that will last for a total of 7 days, aptly titled “Around the World in 7 Days”. I have listed two of my domains there, Constantinople.com and Aegean.info - both with a reserve that matches the quality of the domain.

Now let’s go out and make some money!