DomainTools Blog

A confidential informant says Google will stop monetizing all domains if they are less then five days old. This potential new policy change by Google could stop all Domain Tasting in its tracks. The Add Grace Period (AGP) is a time period when registrars can delete a domain at no cost, but in this time frame a registrant could register millions of these temporary domains and place Google Adsense for Domains on them. The result is the ability to produce millions of temporary websites that literally generate millions of dollars in income per week for Google. It was disclosed in court that one of Google’s partners was generating as much as 3 million dollars a month from the practice, and that was after Google’s revenue share. Oversee.net and other companies have been using this practice for years and it will have a direct impact on them. The gravy train of free money might be coming to a halt very fast. This policy change at Google should be announced to the channel partners soon and it will have a huge echoing impact on the Industry.

The good news is the quantity of advertising will now be spread among fewer domains. If bid prices start to rise as a result of this change, domain owners who actually own real, full domains should receive more money. However, some advocates of Domain Tasting say that perhaps no one will be able to serve the niche for some ads and no one will make money on the un-served ads.

I think this is a return of the “Be Good” motto Google had a few years ago. Google has been quietly enabling this practice for years. This is a smart policy move on Google’s part to ward off impending litigation that might have hit them in the coming months. Trademark lawyers have been getting craftier at taking down Kiting by suing under other laws. The new weapon of choice is to use forgery laws instead of trademark laws. The penalty for forgery is much worse and caries a much higher fine per forged article. Dell, Yahoo, and BMW have all filed lawsuits in the last two months asking for millions of dollars of damage from Google partners and I think Google sees the writing on the wall: they might be named next.

The question remains, “Will Yahoo follow suit and also block all advertising on domains less than 5 day old?” I have a feeling Yahoo will do precisely that because they are one of the groups suing Domain Tasters using the forgery law tactic. Most of the big Domain Tasters are now using Google ad syndication feeds to monetize the traffic - those dollars will come knocking on Yahoo’s door soon.

UPDATE BY JAY: The new Google policy will go into effect before the end of February.

I wanted to give a brief overview of how to figure out the PPC value of a domain. A lot of people are confused about the PPC value of their domains. How do you breakdown the value of a domain when you don’t have access to the Parking stats. It is quite simple, take the keywords of the domain and run them through Yahoo or Google’s PPC estimation tools.

I will use the example of TransferMoneyOnline.com, this domain is coming up in the Jan 3rd auction. We take this domain and we get the three keywords, “Transfer Money Online”. We run these keywords through Google like this:

transfer money online = broad match
[transfer money online] = exact match
“transfer money online” = phrase match

I choose $50.00 as my Max PPC cost to figure out the maximum numbers of clicks I would get if I bid on these terms. Then Google shows me the results:

I know that the exact phrase match is worth $2.58 - $3.22 per click. Google estimates that 1 or 2 people a day will click on my ad each day if I bid like this. If 1 or 2 people click that means that 50 or 100 other people are searching on those keywords but will not click on the ad. So I know there is traffic on this search term of around 100 people a day. However when you look at the loose match I see that 8-10 people would click. So there is perhaps another 500 people out there each day that are using more or less keywords. Now for the direct navigation component, how many of these people are typing in .com after their search. Perhaps 10 to 30 people a day because it is generally around 2-8% of the search engine traffic.

If the domain is taken off PPC parking and is built out, it would go from 10 to 30 people a day to 100 to 200 people a day in organic traffic. With adsense and good content the site can now start generating more revenue then just plain parking. At $2 a click that is good money. Giving people a brief tutorial on each way that people can transfer money online would be a good site. Thirty to fifty pages of content would start earning revenue and would cover the reserve on the domain of $3,400.

By dominating the organic results for its own term. Transfer Money Online.com will be able to make a sizable dent in turning a profit. The future of parking is being able to customize and built out websites with good content. I predict the cutting edge parking companies will expand this ability in 2008 and building content on parked domains will be easier.

I am tempted to buy this domain at auction if no one else bids on it so that I can complete part 2 of this tutorial. Taking a good keyword rich domain and turning it into an SEO wonder with good content.

Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have agreed to pay a combined fine of $31.5 million for accepting ads for online gambling. They have all stopped accepting this type of advertising a few years ago but the fines are finally getting settled. It is a crime in the United States to allow gambling online or to enable gambling ads on US websites. This reminds me or prohibition from the 1920s when alcohol was made illegal for 13 years. The 18th amendment made it illegal and the 21st amendment repealed it. During those years “drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.” The only way to control something is to make it legal so that there are structured laws around it. Blanketly making something illegal means that there are no laws around the edges to keep people safe that engage in the activity. It is far better to make laws and govern something then to ignore that it exists.

Anyone can gamble in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and on Indian Reservations. So clearly the difference between offline and online is not what makes something illegal, so then why is our country being hypocritical about gambling not being allowed online?

As a poker player, I personally think this prohibtion is wrong. From my domainer perspective, I also think this is wrong. I hope these 13 years of prohibition pass fast. I know they will pass eventually and when they do the gambling domains will be worth a lot more!!!! We all trade these domains from a lot less because revenue is hard to come by on them. Those domainers that control these forbidden domains will be worth considerably more when they come back in favor.

Have you ever wanted to advertise on DomainTools or another specific site? A lot of people don’t know about the Google Adwords targeted placement feature. The feature is easy to use and allows advertisers to target ads on any site they want.

To create a new placement-targeted campaign, follow these steps:

1) Log in to your AdWords account.

2) Click Placement-Targeted. This link appears on the main page which is the Campaign Summary page, find the table titled Online Campaigns. Click Placement-targeted in the ‘Create a new campaign’ section at the top of the table.

3) Select List URLs. Follow the sign-up wizard instructions to create your campaign and on the third step list DomainTools.com.

It is that simple, you will be able to put Ads on any site you want that is running Google Adsense.

I get this questions a lot, “Does parking your domain hurt your domain’s resale value?” The answer, Yes. You will be hurting the Internal Search Engine scores attached to the domain. Search Engines are more temporal then you would imagine. It is not about having the best site right now, it is often about having a history of being the best site. Credibility doesn’t come overnight so don’t expect your search engine rankings to either. By parking a domain that you plan to develop you are really de-optimizing the domain for future development.

However, I want to stress there are ways to mitigate the damage that parking can cause. If you want to trick a search engine into indexing a parking page you might be messing with fire. These search engine are smart and can see when you are just serving ads. Robots.txt should be used to exclude the entire site or the parking portion of the site from the search engines. If a domain name is robots.txt’ed off from the world it if very unlikely it will get put on a blacklist.

The better your domain, the more likely it will be delisted when parked. If other SEO people out there want that first position they will report you to Google using the Google Spam Removal Tool.

A lot of developers don’t want to buy a domain for a new site that has been blacklisted at Google. I however see opportunity. If you want to build a company on the domain there is no problem doing it. Buy the domain, Take down the parking page, place some content on the site, build some value to visitors, and then finally submit a Reinclusion Request to Google. I did this with DomainTools.com, I bought the domain from a guy who had adult content on the old site.

When requesting reconsideration of a site that has violated the webmaster guidelines you will be asked to pledge no more violating the Google guidelines.

• Upon reviewing your site, you found that it violated our webmaster guidelines and you’ve made changes to your site so that it adheres to the guidelines. [?]

OR

• You recently acquired a domain which you suspect may have previously violated our webmaster guidelines.

Once it is done they advise that it may take several weeks for the re-evaluation process.

Specifically the guideline say, “If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.” In other words, if you just display ads there is no unique content. Google will remove your domain from its Search Engine and put you in the blacklist.

Chameleon typo squatters are nothing new, but I have never blogged about them so I thought I would share with people on what they are and how to spot them. If you look up a domain name’s whois record the domain appears to be owned by the legitimate owner however that is never the case with a chameleon. These domains hide in plain sight and use victim’s contact information instead of their own. They can be spotted a few ways. One, the email may be the only thing wrong in the record. Two, the administrative email may be correct but the domain is at a registrar that the owner never uses. I was looking up GoogleWishes.com the other day and I spotted a Chameleon.

Detection is often easier if the victim keeps their domains at one registrar then it is actually very easy to spot them.

Here is a good example of a chameleon:

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.

Who owns one word generic domains? The easy answer is, Domainers. It was very cool to find that Matt Cutts of Google owns three domain names and one of them is a generic word. Dullest.com is a name Matt found one day looking through the deleting domain lists back in 2003, when he saw a one word generic domain drop he registered the domain pretty easily, there was no automated army back then snapping up every dropped domain. I estimate that the domain is worth about $3,000. Had Matt worked harder at picking up domains he may not need his day job.

So what is Matt doing with Dullest.com?
He has placed a robots.txt file on the server that blocks all search engine robots from crawling his site. The one word website that says, “Arouw.”, I have not figured out what that word means. It is not french, so I think it is a fictional word. Is Google testing to see where that made up word gets copied too?

Matt’s most famous domains.
MattCutts.com is the most famous domain that Matt owns, he started a blog that talks about his experiences and sometimes things he is doing at Google. He is an unofficial spokesperson for Google because he understands the engine under the hood and knows how to speak in public. He also worked at the Department of Defense while in college and had Top Secret clearance which demonstrates he knows how to keep a secret. Matt started blogging so that he could see the same issues that webmasters had. He became a webmaster so that he could walk in their shoes.

The third domain.
Matt tracks down a lot of dirty SEO people. So I think he registered ShadySEO.com because he wants to secretly be one. It is that or perhaps he will publishing a list one day with all the SEOs that he has taken down and dumped out of Google index. Or perhaps “Shady SEO” will be the name of the book he writes one day. Registering a concept or idea years before you do something with it is required now days. I guess we will wait and see what he does with the domain.

What domain should Matt get next?
I think Matt should park a domain name. He would experience what domainers experience. Matt has stated that he will not run Google Adsense because it is a conflict of Interest. He thought about running Yahoo’s ads but I haven’t seen any on his website. I think he would be ok running a parking page that was powered by Yahoo. I bet he would make a dollar a day just because he owns the domain and people would check it out. He Matt, why not park Dullest.com and get it banned. Then try pulling it out of of the bad and building a website on it. It would be an interesting experiment that would get you closer to what we experience and perhaps Google would change the way they do thing for the better because of your experiences.

I just read a blog post from ShoeMoney that made my head spin. He said he got an email from an editor at DMOZ which demanded $5,000 or his site would be de-listed. He ignored the email and a few days later the guy emailed again letting him know he had been delisted and that he should re-think the $5,000 offer. Sure enough he had been delisted. Instead of caving in he blogged about it. The best weapon against corruption is a huge public spotlight.

A lot of people that I talk to don’t understand what DMOZ is. It is an Open Directory run by AOL (formerly Netscape) that lists websites along with a small description next to them. It is considered by a lot of people to be the start of the Internet. If you designed a search engine crawler this could be the first site you would crawl and from there you could reach any other site. Sort of a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing but for the web. Any way, Google and Microsoft both use this website as one of their primary building blocks for crawling the web. At least that has been the case historically. There are so many clones of the site now that getting listed in the DMOZ (or AKA ODP Open Directory Project) it can still carry a lot of weight.

For a number of years Whois.sc (AKA DomainTools) has been assisting editors of DMOZ for free. We help the DMOZ editors by giving away free access to premium DomainTools memberships. The tools we provide help those editors maintain and groom the directory. There are so many DMOZ editors we limited our donation to only the top editors. The highest status an Editor can be is Meta, then comes EditAll, then comes the normal editors. We currently have 2 Staff, 108 Meta Editors, and 8 EditAlls using our system. You can’t apply for this membership class through any sign-up form on our site. A few select DMOZ staff editors have an interface at DomainTools for granting special access to these Meta Editors.

I honestly think most of the editors are good and try to do there best to create the best human edited directory of websites in the world. Corruption can happen in any organization so I hope this situation is resolved quickly and that the bad apple is thrown out. Abusing a position like that is just down right sick. I have seen too many meta editors spend years of their life organizing the web for no pay at all to start believing tails that DMOZ as a whole is corrupt. Just as Police have Internal Affairs that investigate other Police the DMOZ has a system too. The abuse reporting system is located at http://report-abuse.dmoz.org. This site will investigate reports of abuse and take action. I would encourage people to submit reports of abuse directly to this page.

I often wonder why some of the editors would serve for free, could it be to get better placement for their sites. It would be nice to see a few paid editors that have taken a vow of no affiliation with any site. I don’t think there is enough transparency in the DMOZ system. Sites like Wikipedia have that transparency because every edit is being watched and it goes directly back to a user’s history. I helped start AboutUs.org because I thought it would be a way for everyone to edit a web directory. I think there is plenty of room for more directories. DMOZ is not perfect but I don’t think it is broken either. I would like to see more transparency at DMOZ in the future.

I attended a Tech Talk tonight at Google’s Kirkland offices where Vint Cerf was speaking about his history with the Internet. Vint Cerf is the current Chairman of ICANN and also a Google employee. Vint’s official title is Chief Internet Evangelist, where he does a number of Internet outreach projects for Google. His talk covered everything from his involvement with the creation of the Internet to his current work with NASA on Inter-Planetary Networking Protocol. I always learn something new when talking with him so anytime he is speaking I try to attend. This time he talked about his Internet Wine Cork Screw idea. Why not have a cork with built-in memory? It would record the temperature of the bottle every minute since it was corked. If there was a day where the temperature was abnormal, that would be stored in the history of the cork. The owner of the wine could interrogate the cork and ask if it was ever stored in a temperature that was too hot. The owner could know how likely the wine is to have gone bad. That is a great idea and I hope one day my wine is connected to the Internet via Cork History Temperature Protocol CHTP.

I didn’t have a blog back in 2005, so I will share another fun story about Vint. I rounded up a few players for a game of Poker in Argentina at an ICANN meeting and Vint Cerf joined us. He announced to the table that he had an early morning the next day and that he wanted to surrender his chips. We told him that we would not accept his chips and that if he wanted out he would have to go “All-In”. Vint then declared an All-In on the next hand. Everyone at the table sensed blood in the water so two players at the table went All-In as well. They were hunting for Vint’s chips. Little did they realize Vint was sitting on a pocket pair of Aces. I have seen this strategy a number of times in professional poker. A player announces they are tired and then they go All-In with their killer hand. Some of the players believe the player really wants to go home or leave and they gladly go All-In believing they have a better hand. Vint Cerf proved that he could easily play professional poker in Vegas if this Internet thing does not pan out.

Vint Cerf shows his Pocket Aces.

Elliot Noss (CEO of Tucows) loses all his money.
Jeff Eckhaus (Register.com) laughing with amusement.
Paul Stahura (President of eNom) can’t believe his eyes.

Vint Cerf rakes it all in and ends up winning the whole game.