Fool’s gold Part 4: .tel it like it is

After pretty much analyzing the prospects of ICANN’s latest TLD – .tel – in my previous three installments, I was patiently waiting for the “free for all” day – March 24 – the day that hordes of lemmings will jump from the high cliff onto this amazing new investment opportunity. Or not.

However, a lengthy comment left at Part 1 of the series by a gentleman named Hanz made me dig a little deeper, just barely below the surface of the .tel propaganda machine.

Hanz, who seems to promote a variety of pills for every disease from his web site, pills.tel, argued on the popularity of .tel domains as seen by Google. For example’s sake, he quoted a company called “Largeco” and that out of millions of results for “Largeco” their .tel domain is #1 in Google.

We’ll see how high Largeco ranks, after my blog post gets syndicated onto Google.

I understand that Hanz chose pills.tel as his only chance to obtain a generic keyword unavailable in any other major TLD – not without paying a few thousand bucks for it. But in doing so, he chose the most unattractive and downright spamalicious TLD to build his linkfarm onto. Hanz, I’ve seen some ugly “viagra” web sites but this one beats them all. No offense, that’s the nature of the .tel beast.

Onto the subject of “Largeco.tel” that Hanz said comes #1 in Google, when searching for “Largeco”.

First of all, it appears that “Largeco” and Largeco.com are owned by Yahoo and are being actively monitored by Mark Monitor for trademark enforcement. So whoever registered “Largeco1.com” that is simply a link pusher for Largeco.tel opened up their options for litigation from the owners of the Largeco mark, Yahoo.

Here lies the “ingenuity” – or rather, stupidity, of the people who decided to register Largeco1.com and set up a page with a large image, depicting “The power of .tel” with a prompt to click on it and visit Largeco.tel

Looking up Largeco1.com at DomainTools shows that the domain is owned by “Benjamin Blumenthal”. There is also another domain hosted on the same dedicated server, which resolves to selma.nic.tel : Smallco1.com – In turn, Smallco1.com is used as a prop for smallco.tel

Nice SEO skills, guys. Using dummy .com pages to push the rankings of .tel domains that belong to fictitious companies. Makes me feel really warm and fuzzy about the capabilities in ranking for .tel domains. Not!

And the final straw:

Looks like Mr. Benjamin Blumenthal is the Director of Marketing for Telnic, according to ICANNWiki.

So there you have it, my friend Hanz: If you show me how high your pills.tel ranks in Google, I might give you some credit. Until then, I will assume that you were fed the same fairy tale as many other hopeful entrepreneurs that already spent $300 a pop for “premium” but useless .tel domains.