DomainTools Blog

We found out the answer to that question the other day, having gained access to Google Analytics Real-Time. It was amazing to see the number of site visitors flicker from moment to moment. Ah, the moment we have been waiting for finally  came true- here’s the evidence!

Yesterday, here was a snapshot of how many people were on DomainTools.com  when we first accessed the Right Now beta, around noon Pacific Time:

And today, around 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time, encroaching on 3k again…

So far, we are thrilled to be able to see a live pulse of our website anytime we like. Next up: we’ll look into the real-time reports. If you’d like to know immediate impact to site traffic, access real-time reports, we’d recommend looking into Google Analytics Real Time. Right now it’s still in early beta but you can sign up for early access to the beta here.

Last week, I explained how simple it can be to gain insight into companies’ product plans by using DomainTools to track the domain names they register. If you’ve been using our services to do that fora long time, you’ll have no doubt noticed that every company has a different strategy, in terms of how,and more importantly when, they register domains related to new and upcoming offerings.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest names in mobile computing, for example. Just last week news emerged that Blackberry maker Research In Motion had registered over 300 domains for its new Curve phones. The list of domains covered a broad range of extensions, as well as variations using hyphens, abbreviations and additional keywords including the scary “sucks” suffix.

These were classic cases of defensive registrations – domains registered in order to keep them out of the hands of opportunistic cybersquatters. For a brand owner particularly at risk of squatting, preemptively registering hundreds of domains at $10 each may sometimes make more economic sense than later filing a UDRP complaint, which can cost many thousands of dollars.

Other companies, such as Google, take a less comprehensive approach, preferring to register a handful of key domains before they launch a new product, and pick off egregious cases of cybersquatting later. Google obtained plus.me in November 2010, for example, even though Google+ did not launch until June 28 this year. It had owned googleplus.com since winning it with a UDRP complaint in 2002, and won googleplusone.com in early June 2011 the same way.

But within 24 hours of Google+ launching, dozens of domains had been registered by people hoping to ride the wave of the service’s expected popularity. Registrations included straightforward cases such as googleplus.biz, keyword domains such as googleplusgames.com, typos such as googlepuls.com, and domain hacks such as google-pl.us. These kinds of domains are extremely vulnerable to cybersquatting claims and have virtually zero resale value to experienced investors.

If Blackberry is at one end of the spectrum, and Google occupies the middle ground, then Apple is an example of a company that often virtually ignores domain names when it launches products. When Apple launched the iPhone, it did not own iphone.com and later was forced to pay a seven-figure sum to the registrant, who had owned it since 1995. The company still does not own ipad.com, which was registered by somebody else in 1997. If it chooses to buy the domain now, it will probably have to pay more than it would have in 2009, before the iPad launched.

But this may actually be smart strategy for Apple. The company has always developed its new products in strict secrecy, encouraging its fan base to speculate about its next move. This created grassroots buzz for months before the moment Steve Jobs took the stage to officially unveil the company’s latest innovation. With so much brand capital relying on these staged, set-piece announcements, a premature domain registration or purchase may, for Apple, be more damaging than having to pay a couple million bucks later for an important domain.

When it comes to registering domain names, whether defensively or as part of a marketing plan, there’s no one-size-fits all strategy for the world’s biggest brands.

We just wrapped up our with SMX Advanced in Seattle this Tuesday and Wednesday. If you missed the press release about our attendance, be sure to read it. It was our first time at a search marketing conference, and it was interesting to introduce DomainTools to curious attendees who wanted more in-depth details about all of our services. Those conversations were nicely balanced with  stories from others who enthusiastically said, “I use you guys all the time”.  We love attending conferences as a chance to meet members and learn about what people love to use.

Here are a few photos of the conference, also posted on our Facebook page:

One of the highlights of SMX Advanced, like previous conferences, has been the You&A with Matt Cutts. Coined the Alan Greenspan of Google, Matt is their most well-known software engineer. The You&A was a hilarious and very engaging discussion that started out with Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Land, giving Matt a giant Panda bear along with a panda foot stool. An interesting story surfaced about Larry Page, CEO of Google, and his search for the term “warm mangos”. The Google team who was working on improving search quality needed to understand the logic behind someone searching for the term ‘warm mangos’ – turns out, mangoes warm up when they are packaged in boxes due to the carbon dioxide produced. As the banter about ‘warm mangos’ was being highlighted, it is not a coincidence that WarmMangos.com was registered during that session

Wouldn’t it be really convenient to access Domain ownership records anytime, anywhere? From your phone, desktop or toolbar for Firefox, Chrome or Safari? Or, do you use WordPress and want the DomainTools plugin for your website? Well, good news! DomainTools has all of these applications available, right NOW.

We’ve seen many blog posts featuring different DomainTools applications and how to install them, but wanted to give everyone a run-down of ALL of the applications that make DomainTools’ Whois and other services that much easier to access:

DomainTools Whois iPhone App – Do quick queries of a domain name to retrieve the most recent Whois record from DomainTools.com right from your iPhone, iPad and IPod touch. You can also check out the most recent screenshot history image of the domain names’ homepage and find available names in other gTLD or ccTLD extensions and order them directly from your iPhone or iPad.

DomainTools for Windows – Get easy access to Whois records from the system tray so you can access the DomainTools Whois record with one click. Done.

Google Toolbar Plugin - Installing the icon in the Google Toolbar for quick and easy access to DomainTools services including:

• Whois Lookup
• Domain Search & Suggestions
• Name Server Alert
• Trademark Alert
• For Sale
• Internet Statistics
• And More!

DomainTools Whois Toolbar Bookmark – By placing the DomainTools Whois link in your link bar, you will be able to lookup the Whois record of the site you are visiting. Installation is easy. Simply drag the link to the browsers’ link toolbar for Firefox, Chrome and Safari or right-click and ‘Add to Favorites’ for Internet Explorer.

DomainTools WordPress Plugin - Automatically link your domain names in a WordPress page or blog post to the DomainTools Whois service. It also generates a pop-up containing a summary of Whois information that your visitors can see without leaving your site (score!)

Firefox Search Extensions – Installing these Firefox extensions will add another search engine to Firefox’s search box in theupper right corner of your browser.

Add Whois Engine

Add Ping Engine

Add DNS Engine

Add Traceroute Engine

Unofficial Firefox Toolbar Extensions…

The following Firefox extensions were published by DomainTools users and incorporate the DomainTools services into their functionality.

• Domain Lookup - Domain Lookup is a Firefox extension that helps you discover valuable generic domain names while surfing the web. Just select the text you wish to check and hit the shortcut key. Domain Lookup checks availability at your favourite registrar in a heartbeat.
• DT Whois – Adds a button to your browser for easy access to current site’s whois record.
• SEO – Contains a Whois button that uses DomainTools.com
• SEO Toolbar - A customizable toolbar that includes access to the DomainTools Whois service.

We realize there may be additional extensions that others have developed that may be missing from this list. It would be great to know what else is out there, so give us a shout if you know about others that are out in the wild!

I have been playing with Google Ad Planner for about a week now and it is by far the best third party metrics tool out there. I can now directly query Google for how popular a website is and how many users they have. I have found that if a website doesn’t have more then 3,000 visitors a month then Google doesn’t list the website inside the tool. So… You can see how well really good parking pages are doing by using this tool. Oddly though, Google.com and other Google domains are removed from the tool! I guess Google only wants you to know the traffic of everyone else except for themselves. That is a bit hypocritical that I can see Yahoo.com but not Google.com.

I highly suggest signing up for the beta and taking this very powerful tool for a test drive because it totally kills Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast. I am not sure how Google measures the traffic because they are a third party and they can’t actually track users unless they are directly auditing ALL users of a website. They must have several panels they use. Could they be using the Toolbar data finally? I doubt that, Google has always stayed far away from actually using the Google Toolbar for evil.  I can’t wait for the API! (Google, If you are listen, the world wants an API). DomainTools currently grabs data at Alexa, Compete, and Quantcast and displays those stats on the whois record if the domain has enough traffic to show up.

I Google is using analytics data if you have shared it with other Google projects. I remember signing some digital waiver a few months ago on analytics, I trust Google and I am not too concerned where the data would be given out in detail. I don’t really care if people know what traffic we get in summary mode.

Here are some FAQs directly from Google that explain the data better.

Q: Where does Google Ad Planner demographic data come from?
A: Google Ad Planner demographic information is provided by third-party market research data, opt-in consumer user panel data, and algorithms that improve the demographic estimates. (Demographic data is currently available for the United States only.)

Q: How is the data in Google Ad Planner generated?
A: Google Ad Planner combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information. In addition, Google Ad Planner only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool. For more information about how Google protects privacy, please refer to our privacy policy.

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.