Sedo and Name.com: Who’s telling porkies about parking?

A few days ago I let one of my domains – Greek.in – cross its expiration date.

The domain is with Name.com and I simply “ignored” the reminders on a busy week.

While in the process of renewing it, I noticed that the domain was displaying a standard Sedo ad page, with the minimal, greenish text against a white background. There was no contact information regarding a sale on that page.

Checking the DNS I noticed that it was still that of Voodoo.com where I park some of my domains. I assumed that some type of DNS wizardry was occurring in the background, so I contacted Name.com support.

I was told that per the terms of use, Name.com reserves the right to park and monetize my traffic while I don’t renew my domain.

Since the domain was already listed for sale in my Sedo account, it was obvious that Name.com was forwarding it to a landing account of their own at Sedo.

After contacting my account manager at Sedo I was told that all URL forwarding has been ended for Sedo customers, at the request of Google. To use Sedo parking and monetize traffic, one must use the Sedo DNS.

So what’s going on here? Is Sedo giving “elite” customers such as Name.com a different ad channel to monetize domains and pile them up onto one account? Or is Name.com oblivious of the fact that this method of forwarding reaps no monies from traffic?

Within 4 hours of renewing my domain, it was pointing back to Voodoo.com but the mystery still remains.