A little over a month ago I posted about how a domain name that I own received 2,500 WHOIS queries at the Registrar, Fabulous.com
In a nutshell, Fabulous.com keeps track of the number of WHOIS lookups for domains registered with them and lists those numbers alongside the domain’s expiration date, inside your account control panel.
It’s obvious that domains that are looked up the most are usually monitored for pending availability by third parties and are entered into a number of droplists.
My little experiment so far has piled another 450 WHOIS queries to the original 2,500 – all while the domain expires in 15 days from now. Originally, I planned to wait almost 3 months before posting an update here but I thought it’d be better to keep track of this milestone as well.
The bottom line: vultures are always out there checking out your best and most valuable domains; it’s great that Fabulous.com provides this type of information that can help you gauge the value of your domain names – and a reminder to renew them well in advance!
Hey Theo,
GoDaddy has this feature as well. You can actually export the results of your entire domain portfolio into csv format and then organize from there. Glad to see fabulous is doing this as it definitely is an important feature.
@Acro: Interesting info.
After renewal when you do the wrapup post, can you give some general info on the domain’s category, age, dictionary/long tail, etc.?
Hopefully Moniker has this whois count feature on their todo list.
Jason – How’s it going? 😀 I agree with you, it’s a feature that gives extra insight to domain valuation regardless of actual traffic.
SL – Thanks. The domain is a two word dot com, registered in 2002. It’s the only registered TLD.
Theo, if you have the domain parked does it receive a comparable amount of traffic? i would expect a domain receiving that many look ups to also receive quite a number of type-ins/traffic. if so, do you get many offers on it? you might want to experiment with forwarding the domain to a custom built sales landing page, rather than a parked page, you should see an improvement over the number of inquires vs a standard parking page. cheers
good tip
I use this for all my godaddy accounts and it has been helpful and even led to some domain sales!
@ Acro,
After reading you post i tried to look for this in my Fabulous account but was not able to found this detail.
Can you provide the link / tab details / screenshot etc of Fab where i can get this Whois information.
Thanks
At godaddy I have a two word dot com registered in 1996 which expires in 2015. It normally gets about 50 whois queries per month.
It got about 900 whois queries in Dec 2010 when it was already good till 2015. What could explain sudden jump ?
Queries in Jan and Feb 2011 were back to about 50 per month.
Sid – It’s under Expiry Control. That’s where you can sort the domains in your portfolio by the number of WHOIS queries (descending).
@ Acro
Thanks