DomainTools Blog

I saw this interesting Google Ad today. I saw the ad inside my gmail account, but the weird thing is that this ad was for a PPC page. The ad was for the domain name “V V hite House.com”, which looks like whitehouse.com. Is this an Ad designed to arbitrage Google traffic, or is the domain really being sold or leased? The ad took me to a PPC page over at Oversee with no ability to buy the domain or lease it. The only thing on the landing page was a bunch of PPC ads. Perhaps this ad is being shown on PPC pages as well, which would really complete the circle. When a parking page is being advertised, you know something odd is going on. I honestly thought the domain was being sold but it turned out to be an ad for a parking page.

Upon a deeper check I took a look at the whois record for vvhitehouse.com and it appears to be owned by Domainamania.com LLC, which is a snapnames company, which is an Oversee company, which is the company that actually parks the domain. The domain whois record said it was listed for sale at Sedo for $2500. So I visited the Sedo for sale page for the domain and it had this description:

The ClickAlike.com portfolio includes look-alikes for many of the highest priced generic domains ever sold, including some of this years top-selling domains. ClickAlikes are a whole new breed. Clickalikes can be a thrifty and clever fiat to enable otherwise unattainable marketability. Because ClickAlikes convey the same meaning as the actual generic domain, (for example, www.incorporation.com can be represented as www.lncorporation.com), they can be an extremely important asset in driving web traffic.

Which means Click-A-Like domains cost $6.42 to register and can be sold for $2500. That is a nice profit. I wonder if anyone is buying them? If so, I can see a bunch of domainers going out and registering these types of domains. I went over to the domain being advertised (ClickaLike.com) in the Sedo description and it was a parking page. Go figure.

UPDATE: My deeper check that showed the domain was for sale on Sedo was half correct. The previous owner had listed it for sale on Sedo and it is still listed. Sedo has no automated mechanism of removing the old listings, so there may be a lot of old listings that are not truly for sale. Snapnames and Oversee are not associated with ClickALike.com. That description must have been the previous owner. Snapnames registered the domain for $6.20 this summer on a drop. Snapnames claims no ownership of the Google Ad. So it appears on the surface that the old owner (JB of WirelessGarden.com) is still running advertising to sell or lease his old domain which he failed to renew in April of this year. Wow. You see something new everyday.

Large corporations tell a lot of secrets and they don’t even know it. The DomainTools Name Server Spy allows people to monitor name servers for changes. To test our own service I monitor a few interesting name servers. Disney Internet Group is one of them. For example, on the 25th of this month we spotted Super Blu Ray.com get registered. Could this be the name of the second generation Blu-Ray discs? I think so. I am still confused. Sony developed the Blu-Ray disc so I am not sure what Disney is doing yet. I guess we will wait and see.

Another example earlier this month was on the 6th when Disney registered a brand new domain called, High School Musical Live On Stage.com. What a long domain name! It must be for a new production they are setting up for either a TV show on ABC, a Musical on Broadway, or a new Movie. Had someone been watching they would have seen this intent and known that domain would never fly. Less the 2 weeks later and we can see Disney ended up purchasing the more generic domain High School Musical.com. I don’t think I will watch this show because I hate musicals but at least Disney is getting the generic domain names.

My favorite so far is the new Reality TV show that must have made it as a TV pilot, Russian To The Altar.com. I can’t wait! I wonder if it will make it to air.

It is so much fun to come up with theories on what peoople are doing with their new domain names.

Who is a Rat? Well that is what I want to know. The site whosarat.com just went down and Google’s toolbar is directing enough Traffic to Google to make it a Hot Trend. I picked up on the trick, but have yet to figure out how that helps domainers. I can see that the more Google releases data like this, the better hunting for new topics and domains becomes a lot easier.

When a site goes down it show up as Google’s Hot Trends. This shows how powerful Google Toolbar is and how many people have it installed. Google redirects failed DNS queries to his search engine and therefore domains that no longer resolve appear on Google’s Hot Trends. I suspect this might change after this post, but it was bound to happen.

So there are two strategies we can glean from this – just turn off your DNS for a day and you will appear in Googles Hot Trends. I doubt the publicity that you get from turning off your website will be much, but it might be worth experimenting with. Our switch from Whois.sc to DomainTools caused a lot of extra traffic. This doesn’t seem to be a long term plan unless it can be orchestrated on a large scale. Or two, follow the trends and find the patterns that make you money.

I am not sure why the site went down, since it is registered until 2011. But the cached page of the website describes complaints about bandwidth and hosting costs and asked people to donate and pay for the service.

A flood of traffic that doesn’t support the business model means one thing – the business model needs to change. A lot of companies feel entrenched in their current business model and rather go out of business than adapt.

Microsoft unveiled PopFly today. It is some fancy website that creates mashups, but I was more interested in their new domain name then the product.

The domain did not show any signs Microsoft owned it until today. We checked the Whois History and yesterday it was registered to William McCarthy from Emeryville California and has since he first registered it in May of 2000. Not even the name servers changed until today. This shows that Microsoft is very aware they should not leak secrets via DNS. A lot of Public companies still do not realize every DNS change they make is logged by us. We use Name Server Spy to watch every domain that touches Microsoft’s DNS server so perhaps they are aware people watch them. A lot of companies still haven’t figure this out yet, so do us a favor, don’t let them know .

This is one of the first times Microsoft picked a product name that doesn’t sound so corporate. It is still a bad name, but at least it is easy short and catchy. Just go to PopFly.com. Microsoft didn’t register this domain new, they bought it from the owner. This also shows the after-market is live and well but they didn’t buy the domain from an after-market site, they bought it from the owner. Most sales in the after-market are direct sales.

The world is turning for us! Why is Microsoft crawling our website using Blogger.com as the referral string? Last time I checked Blogger.com was a domain that Google owned.

Here is an example line from our log file where we see this happened:

209.249.11.3 – - [21/Mar/2007:00:44:48 -0700] “GET /takeoutrestaurants.com HTTP/1.0″ 200 9624 “http://www.blogger.com/” “MSRBOT” whois.domaintools.com

To double check someone is not playing a trick on us I tracerouted the IP address.

traceroute to 209.249.11.3 (209.249.11.3), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 66.249.16.130 (66.249.16.130) 0.545 ms 0.528 ms 0.487 ms
2 ip-64-246-162-161.ipd.CCOM.NET (64.246.162.161) 0.360 ms 0.965 ms 0.363 ms
3 19c1-18s1.sea.fibercloud.NET (216.145.30.158) 0.364 ms 0.348 ms 0.364 ms
4 19b1-19c1.sea.fibercloud.NET (216.145.30.142) 0.738 ms 0.476 ms 0.744 ms
5 GigabitEthernet4-0.GW7.SEA1.ALTER.NET (157.130.190.137) 0.510 ms 0.583 ms 0.366 ms
6 146.ATM2-0.XR2.SEA1.ALTER.NET (152.63.105.182) 0.736 ms 0.599 ms 0.616 ms
7 POS7-0.BR1.SEA1.ALTER.NET (152.63.105.21) 0.614 ms 0.473 ms 0.489 ms
8 204.255.169.106 (204.255.169.106) 0.990 ms 1.102 ms 1.490 ms
9 so-2-2-2.mpr1.sjc2.us.above.net (64.125.28.182) 35.468 ms 27.212 ms 27.221 ms
10 so-4-0-0.mpr3.pao1.us.above.net (64.125.28.221) 27.841 ms 27.835 ms 27.967 ms
11 * * *

Looks like it goes to above.net just before it gets caught by a firewall. I looked at the whois record for the IP address, it points to Microsoft and the IP address has been swipped to them from above.net. So everything checks out.

I then ran a reverse DNS query on the IP address and I got the host: msrbot-rtr01.msrbot.net.

I then ran the forward DNS on the Host “msrbot-rtr01.msrbot.net” and it resolved back to the above.net again. Different IP address but same datacenter Ip address provider. I wish Microsoft as a whole would follow the verification process they said they were going to use. It is not hard to nail down reverse DNS and then forward DNS to verify that a bot belongs to a company. Either someone in above.net datacenter is pretending to be Microsoft or this is the real deal. My bet is that this is Microsoft Research and they don’t follow the same protocols as corporate.

;; ANSWER SECTION:
msrbot-rtr01.msrbot.net. 83145 IN A 209.66.91.13

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
msrbot.net. 83145 IN NS ns0.directnic.com.
msrbot.net. 83145 IN NS ns1.directnic.com.

But looking at the Name Server, I see Microsoft is using Directnic for is DNS. Why would Microsoft Research use a Registrar’s DNS servers if Microsoft has their own corporate name server. Well, I guess they are far enough away from Redmond they don’t have the password or something to the corporate DNS server. The whois record on the bots reverse host name is msrbot.net and shows Microsoft Research in Mountain View, CA.

I am very perplexed, why is Microsoft Research crawling around the web using Blogger.com as the referral string!

 UPDATE: We emailed Microsoft Research about the bot. This is the response we received back from them.

—–Original Message—–
From: Dennis Fetterly [mailto:*********@microsoft.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2007 2:53 PM
To: Jay Westerdal
Subject: RE: Help on your crawler

Jay,

As you know, the referring URL just indicates which URL the crawler was visiting when it discovered the link to a page on your site.  It is strange that so many requests for pages on your site are showing up with a referral of www.blogger.com.  I’m looking into it; thanks for the report.

Cheers,
-Dennis

—————————-

UPDATE: As of today, MSRBOT has crawled 9,487 pages all with the same referral string. http://www.blogger.com/

I just don’t buy that the main page of blogger had a link to 9,487 pages on our site. I have to call it like it is, the MSRBot has something broken with it. Also, robots don’t crawl using a referral string traditionally.