Zoho Corporation, also known as Zoho CRM, had their entire domain name taken down by their registrar Tierranet (aka DomainDiscover). According to a Tweet by Zoho CRM’s CEO Sridhar Vembu, they were trying to understand why the domain was taken down entirely. [Read more…]

When you buy an expired domain name, owning that domain name does not give you the legal right to any other accounts that are associated with that domain name. For example, if you buy a domain name that has an email address that was set up by the former owner, I don’t think that you don’t have rights to accounts that were set up by that former owner. [Read more…]

Hartzer Consulting has chosen to exclusively broker a large domain name portfolio of 500 domain names. About 400 of the domain names are in the Home Inspection niche, with the majority of them including a city name along with keywords such as home inspection, home inspections, home inspector, or home inspectors. Some of the domain names include BeverlyHillsHomeInspector.com, LAHomeInspectors (LA for Los Angeles or LA for Louisiana), LouisvilleHomeInspection.com, and MiamiHomeInspection.com. [Read more…]

I continue to hear it over and over again: people saying that they should always use a .COM domain name for your website. I questioned someone just the other day about their statement. The answer they had was “have you ever seen a non .COM website rank in the search engine results?” [Read more…]

Yes, I know the title of this post sounds harsh: should you use a dash or a hyphen in a domain name? But to be honest with you, that is my conclusion now that I have seen this. It’s solid proof that the right keyword rich domain name will out-rank a hyphenated domain name in the search results every time. Don’t use a Hyphen in Domain Name, here’s proof of that. [Read more…]

Hartzer Consulting, in a sponsored case study that was just released, analyzed three different car dealership web sites that are on a geo-related (city or State) .CARS domain name. Of the three web sites we analyzed, two of the car dealerships built brand new web sites on a .CARS domain name. One car dealership moved their existing web site from a .COM domain name to a .CARS domain name, ArizonaUsedCars.com moved to Arizona.CARS. [Read more…]

One of the longstanding debates amongst those who are fans of .COM domain names and those who accept the New gTLD domain names is whether or not the public confuses a New gTLD domain name ending with a .COM domain name. So, if you have a domain name like whatever.widgets, those who are fans of .COM domain names say that whatever.widgets will lose traffic to someone mistyping it. The argument is that they’ll type in whatever.widgets.com or whateverwidgets.com (and not type in whatever.widgets). [Read more…]

For the second time in a row, one of my domain names has been denied an SSL certificate because of it’s domain name. But, this second time, the website went down without warning, despite being on CloudFlare. [Read more…]

GoDaddy has signed an agreement for the sale of its PlusServer business to funds advised by BC Partners for $456 million (€397 million). As part of the transaction, PlusServer will assume liabilities of €23 million and retain existing cash on the balance sheet of €12 million. The deal is expected to close by the end of August pending regulatory approval. [Read more…]

The New gTLD domain names have been available for a few years now. As you may know by know, I have done new gTLD research in the past because I’m generally interested in the New gTLDs from a marketing perspective. I’m not as interested in them from a domain investor perspective. Thanks to NTLD Stats, we can see how many domain names have been registered for each New TLD. That’s helpful, from many standpoints. We know which TLDs are selling. [Read more…]

Domain registries Donuts and Rightside are combining, with Donuts, Inc. acquiring Rightside Group for a purchase price of $213m. Rightside will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Donuts, which is a privately-held company. Rightside’s common shares will no longer be listed on any public market. [Read more…]

The .XYZ Registry has launched 1.111B Class, a new ongoing promotion for certain .XYZ domain names. Every domain name that’s a 6-digit, 7-digit, 8-digit, and 9-digit numeric .xyz domain will be $.99 cents to register, renew, and transfer. And that’s just not for the first year–it’s forever. That 1.111 billion domain names, thus this promotion is called “1.111B Class”. [Read more…]

Back in 2011, I reported that Microsoft bought a series of 49 domain names on one day–but what was most interesting to me was that they bought 8 SEO domain names, primarily Bing SEO domain names. These were mainly to protect their brand, I suspect. Here’s a list of the SEO-related domain names that they bought that day: [Read more…]

Have you bought a domain name, without doing the proper domain name due diligence, and put a developed it–to then find out that it’s banned in Google or has a search engine penalty? Well, according to a recent post a Search Engine Roundtable, there are people discussing this very issue. [Read more…]

I’ve written several times about various domain name email spam (scams) out there. There is one in particular, now, that seems to be very persistent with their sending of emails. The Subject of the email that you receive is usually “DomainName.com Notification” where “DomainName.com” is the name of a domain name that you own. The scam is the essentially the same–they’re trying to get you to worry that you have not paid for “search engine optimization submission expiration of your domain”. [Read more…]

As I previously reported, Apple is registering nonsense domain names and then deleting them after three years. This latest round of dropped and deleted domain names involves 21 domain names. [Read more…]

In this mobile-first world that we’re in, emojis like 😉 and 🙂 are becoming increasingly popular. Google’s search results do, in fact, support emoji characters. Especially in domain names. And, since we’re all using our mobile phones now, and have emoji keyboards built into our phones, it only make sense to consider an emoji domain. [Read more…]

Are you in marketing, like I am? Do you have a marketing-related blog and want the ultimate marketing blog web address? Well, here is your chance. The dot blog domain name extension, .BLOG, is launching on November 21, 2016. If you want to purchase (pre-register) www.marketing.blog for your marketing blog, then you can do so for a mere $139,999.99 over at GoDaddy: [Read more…]

If you’re wanting to transfer a domain name away from the Network Solutions domain name registrar, then their response is typically delayed. They will email you the domain name transfer code 3 days after you request it. [Read more…]

It’s been a long time coming. Dot Brand, the part of the New TLD domain name endings, are now officially here, I’d like to declare. While we have already had several Dot Brands use their branded TLDs for websites and microsites, it’s now that Google has launched their Keyword blog that I can say that Dot Brand is officially launched. [Read more…]

One of the main arguments that I keep being presented with by those who don’t like the New gTLD domain endings is this: New gTLD domain name owners lose traffic to .COM domain names. For example, if I own www.billhartzer.horse, then I will lose traffic to someone mistyping my domain name, and adding .COM to the end like this: billhartzer.horse.com. Many who are not fans of the New gTLD domain extensions (endings) claim that you should NOT buy a New gTLD domain name because you’ll lose traffic to .COM. [Read more…]

A few years ago, back in 2014, I set out on a personal quest to try to answer a question that I had: Will using a keyword rich New gTLD domain name for your website help online marketing efforts? I have to say that so far (as far as I know), I’m the only one out there who have used real world data in an attempt to answer this question. While there certainly have been skeptics and those who question the results, I knew going into this that there would people who will try to poke holes in everything I did. [Read more…]

Backordering a domain name is going to start costing more money starting soon. Both Snapnames and Namejet have announced that the price of backordering a domain name is going to increase from the base of $69 to $79. While you won’t pay the backorder fee unless the drop catching service catches the domain name for you, the price is going up.

Namejet.com sent an email today explaining their price increase: [Read more…]

One of the issues that seems to be plaguing the New gTLD domain name extensions is public acceptance. It’s a hurdle that those selling these new domain name extensions have to overcome. As the public gets more familiar with the fact that there are domain name endings other than .COM, .NET, and .ORG, I’m certain that more of the New gTLD domains names will be sold. Most websites are adopting to the fact that there are new domain name extensions out there, such as .email, and even .ninja (I own www.Bill.Ninja), and most online forms are beginning to accept email address that’s not a .COM email address. What I found hilarious, though, was the fact that some spammers don’t even understand the New gTLDs. [Read more…]

Facebook has acquired the domain name AccountKit.com and they have also just recently registered a lot of typo domain names related to AccountKit.com. Usually when a company registers a lot of typos for a domain name, they plan on using that domain name publicly–and expect that people might mistype the domain name. [Read more…]

Based on domain name registrations by Microsoft in the past few days, Microsoft appears to be working on a project called “Microsoft Madeira”. It could also be called “Project Madeira”. I haven’t seen anything related to this yet based on a Google search: [Read more…]

Is Apple going to finally move to their new TLD (Top Level Domain) .Apple soon? Well, if new domain name registrations are any indication, there are 10 new ways that may show proof of that. Apple recently registered 10 new domain names that all end in their brand name, Apple. [Read more…]

Google is using promoted Tweets on Twitter to promote the use of new gTLD domain names. This is the first time that I’ve seen a promoted Tweet from Google Domains that is specifically that “hundreds of new domains are available”. [Read more…]

Again, on January 9th, Apple register another 682 (six hundred and eighty two!) nonsense domain names. I’ve been following these nonsense domain name purchases since they started purchasing them a while back. Here are a few of the domains on the latest purchase: [Read more…]

I’ve written about this before. And it’s been a while since Apple has registered a set of nonsense domain names. On December 31, 2015, they did it again, they registered 62 new domain names that consist of just nonsense characters. From what I can tell, they don’t really mean anything. Here are a few of the domains that they recently registered: [Read more…]

It’s that time of year. Holiday shopping, spending time with family and friends, and looking back at the past year. It’s been a fabulous year, and I thought that I’d mention a great deal that we are having over at Verified Domains. Between now and the end of 2015, you can take 50% off any Verified Domains service. [Read more…]

I was just interviewed by Borja for the Money Diver podcast about domain names and choosing the right domain name. As a part of this podcast, Borja and I put together a domain name related contest. [Read more…]

As you may be aware, I am a big fan of the new gTLD domain name extensions, there are hundreds of them already in General Availability. So, I was hunting around today, using the technique below, to find available domain names and names that I wish to pre-register.

I found that the first owner of Bill.Ninja failed to renew the domain name, so I was able to pick it up at a minimal cost. I consider that a huge win for me, as it’s a great, short, domain name. I even set up a short email address on it, as well. [Read more…]

Recently, there have been a few interesting posts and videos that I’ve liked that make their points using pizza. So, here are the new gTLD domain name extensions, explained using pizza. Really, it’s pretty simple:

1. The old, traditional .COM is the cheese pizza.

[Read more…]

Google has been officially moved to a new organization called Alphabet. Larry Page, in a letter on their new site, explained that they traditionally don’t do normal things. Sometimes they do things differently because Google isn’t a conventional company. [Read more…]

This week, I’ve launched our new service called Verified Domains. Verified Domains is the first-ever service on the internet that provides comprehensive background checks for domain names. I have personally been working on this patent-pending process since the beginning of this year. Before you buy a domain name and start using it for your website, I urge you to get your domain verified. Not only will we uncover any potential problems with the domain name before you use it, we guarantee it, up to $50,000. [Read more…]

As you may already know, I am an advocate of the New gTLD domain names. Whenever possible, I recommend moving away from a .COM domain name to a New gTLD domain name if that new domain you’re moving to is “better”. Meaning that if you can get a keyword-rich domain (with the keyword in the ending), that ultimately will be the better choice for your site. The New gTLD domains, however, have been slowly been adopted, and what it’s going to take is for more and more mainstream businesses to start moving to a New gTLD. That way the public will be much more accepting of the New gTLDs. [Read more…]