One of the benefits of using Fabulous.com as my primary domain registrar is the ability to instantly track the number of WHOIS queries a domain receives.
With the proliferation of aftermarket services, domains are often polled and queried; that’s an indication of popularity that can be used as a secondary measurement of traffic.
When domains approach their expiration date, such WHOIS queries increase; domains that are “due to expire” begin to appear in pending droplists of drop-catching services.
To put it plainly, the vultures are watching.
Thus, it’s good to be able to see what the vultures are planning and to be able to gauge the popularity and selling potential of your domain names.
I just sorted my list of domains that expire in March at Fabulous by the number of WHOIS queries and I was amazed to find that one of them has had 2,500 WHOIS queries with 55 days to expiry. I’ve seen numbers in the upper hundreds *after* expiration, but nothing quite like this.
I can’t imagine what the number will be with 30 days to go or even past expiry, but I think I will play a game with the vultures, just to experiment a bit with their food.
I will let the domain expire for at least 2 weeks before I renew it, to maximize the WHOIS query stats and I’ll post the results after I renew it.
See you on the same topic in three months from now 😀
Go Daddy supplies this info too. However, does Fabulous supply the all-important metrics of these people conduction the WHOIS? Details like: time, date, country (State, if USA), etc?
Go Daddy wont provide that level of information. Why? Because I think its Go Daddy that is doing the WHOIS hits just so that I renew that name. Call me paranoid but this is a company that once told me “sir, there isnt enough hard drive storage to save all of the WHOIS query information” after I had countless domains registered moments after I would search for them, for clients / projects.
As a software developer of almost 3 decades, I laughed at the customer service rep and hung up on her.
So I am curious to know if you can see just who is doing those searches because Mr. Skeptical here believes the vultures are actually sneaky sales folks.
Hey Mike – No, Fabulous does not provide details such as the ones you mentioned. I believe that GoDaddy’s statement about the amount of space needed to store all this data would be accurate. To me it’s more important to know the volume of queries as I can then track actual visits on the domain by using my own DNS. Visits and queries are two different but equally important metrics; whether GoDaddy actually “massages” the data, I don’t know. Information equals power and I don’t think GoDaddy or anyone else for that matter would want to give it away for free 🙂
Using Godaddy’s Whois lookups download feature I see one domain with close to 1500 lookups last month and almost 100K lookups across my portfolio. However, it seems odd to have so many Whois lookups but so few sales inquiries unless of course the Whois lookups are merely server lookups rather than end user lookups.
Hi Leonard – There is no way to tell. A lookup has to be triggered by a person; even tools such as DomainTools store information passively e.g. after an actual WHOIS is performed. It’s the anomaly in the numbers that led to this post and subsequent “experiment” 😀
Thanks for the response. Re: the data collected at time of the WHOIS request: there is absolutely plenty of storage to store not only the domain name that was searched for but also the IP address, date, time, referrer, user agent and a slew of other details that the HTTP request exposes. Like you said, info is power so they’re not going to give it away for free.
However, without that level of detail, how can you be sure that those 2500 requests arent from a bot or not? Anyone could develop a script to automate WHOIS requests on their behalf, store the results, etc. I wish these places would tell us more because while its in interesting metric (WHOIS counts), its nearly useless without more details (ie. are they unique requests? are they from the United States or what and how many other countries? what dates, times did they request, etc)… They have all of that data. It would be very helpful for us if they offered it (even if at a price).
Mike – My experiment begins by acknowledging that there is no way to see who performs these queries. Bots don’t perform such tasks repeatedly without a purpose. As I said, the domain expires in less than 2 months, which is the main reason why I believe that this spike in queries exists. However, I am willing to keep an eye on it and even let it in expire mode for a while to see how further up this will go 🙂
“Bots don’t perform such tasks repeatedly without a purpose”
You do have a point there. These WHOIS interfaces have anti-bot mechanisms in place. I’ll be curious to see what happens.. 🙂
Mike – Me too 😀 I’ll probably have to pick Mike Robertson’s brain as well.
I’ve got you bookmarked… good luck!