Dan.com is a domain marketplace that in recent years propelled itself onto the top list of favorite platforms for domain investors.
Domain sellers and buyers engage through its well-planned interface and exchange process of funds/domain, making the process a cinch. After testing the Dan.com platform for a while, my first domain sale on Dan.com was almost for $20,000 dollars.
Currently, I’m skeptical about how Dan.com will continue to retain this exceptional growth and independence, what with being acquired by GoDaddy. That being said, I’m still adding domains for sale on Dan.com, moving them away from the Uni Market.
One of these recent addition attempts created a problem: the domain was already added on Dan.com by someone else.
The domain in question is an ultra-premium LLLL .com I acquired more than a dozen years ago. I never added it to Dan.com before and it was always parked at either Sedo or the Uni Market. Therefore, I assume that someone added it to Dan.com illegitimately.
Can someone else add your “for sale” domain on Dan.com?
Once I changed the domain’s DNS to Dan.com nameservers, the domain was resolving; the page’s lander was the typical Dan.com page and on that page the supposed seller’s profile was linked to their other domains for sale on Dan.com.
Our guy has listed a whopping 13,753 four letter .com domains on Dan.com, or about 3% of the available namespace! It’s clear that the list is not legitimate and I’ll be reaching out to Dan.com support about this.
How did I resolve the issue and added my domain to my portfolio at Dan.com?
I had to go to my account Settings, then click on Ownership, and enabled the top option that automates domain ownership via the use of nameservers. Then, having selected the “Verification via .hosting tld” option, I copied that long DNS setting and added it as my third nameserver at my domain’s settings at the Registrar.
There is one more option under that Dan.com setting, “Verification via .hn tld” and a separate option to add a TXT record to your domain’s DNS. The latter is useful if you host the domain on a server, perhaps displaying a custom lander.
Overall, it took very little to overcome this domain ownership issue at Dan.com and I hope that others that may have the same problem can quickly resolve it.
I’ve run across this issue on Dan before.
Changing nameservers to Dan.com and a quick message to support solved the problem for me.
There seems to be quite a bit of front-running on Dan, so tightening the verification process is an value add opportunity.
J.R – I was under the impression that when a domain is added to Dan.com the system checks the DNS first. Apparently, early on when Dan was Undeveloped the process wasn’t as tight and some sellers might have taken advantage of that.
Choosing the custom DNS record ensures that the legitimate owner who has access to the domain’s DNS can verify it. Same with using TXT records. The Dan support team now has all the relevant information to suspend other such domains not owned by the seller.