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…]
Verified Domains Provides Comprehensive Background Checks for Domains
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…]
Even Huge Institutions Can’t Move Their Sites Properly to a New gTLD
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…]
Google Removing Domain Names From Search Results Increases Internet User Vulnerability
On Thursday, April 16, 2015, Google announced that they are beginning to remove the domain name from the mobile search results. Rather than displaying a URL in the search results or a domain name, Google has begun to display a website name or a website name and a breadcrumb of the website’s page. Domain names generally have been removed from the mobile search results. This move by Google is wrong, and ultimately increases internet user vulnerability to potential fraud and deception. Furthermore, it undermines the whole entire Domain Name System as we know it. [Read more…]
ZDNet Buys Domain Name: Immediately Gets 2 Year Old Trusted Site Banned in Google
ZDNet bought a new domain name from the domain name aftermarket (a domain name auction), and almost immediately got their trusted, authoritative, 2 year old website banned in Google. ZDNet wrote a scathing article on their site, blaming Google for the error, claiming that Google got it all wrong. But, that’s not the case. Google absolutely got it right, and was correct in banning the site in Google. Here’s how ZDNet bought a domain name, redirected their trusted, authoritative site to this new domain name, and then got their website banned in Google. [Read more…]
Laureate Education Sues Domain Name Proxy Service for Trademark Infringement
Laureate Education, Inc. is suing Domain Name Proxy Service, Inc. for alleged trademark infringement. Case number 2:15-cv-00879, a suit was filed on March 20th in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. The Domain Name Proxy Service, Inc. address is in Louisiana, therefore Laureate Education decided that it was appropriate to file there. While the lawsuit alleges that OnlineUAEUniversities.com is infringing on trademarks owned by Laureate Education (namely the Walden University and University of Liverpool trademarks), Laureate Education has filed suit against Domain Name Proxy Service because they couldn’t contact the real owner of OnlineUAEUniversities.com. [Read more…]
Apple Pay Supplies Coming for Merchants?
Apple Pay image courtesy of App Advice.
Based on several domain names that have been registered by Apple in the past 24 hours, it appears that Apple could soon offer Apple Pay supplies to merchants. Apple registered domain names like applepaysupply.com and applepaymerchantsupplies.com, along with a host of other similar domain names: [Read more…]
35 Speakers to See at NamesCon 2015
From January 11 to January 15, 2015, the NamesCon 2015 domain name conference is being held in Las Vegas. I’m personally speaking in two separate sessions, and will be attending the conference all week. As with a lot of conferences that I’m attending and speaking at, I go through the list of speakers and hand pick a list of them that I think you should definitely not miss.
ICANN Hacked
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers organization that oversees internet domain names, has been hacked. In late November 2014 they were targeted with a spear phishing attack, and then this month they discovered that the compromised credentials were used to access other ICANN systems besides email. This included the Centralized Zone Data System. [Read more…]
Apple and Afilias Special Projects Register 1800 Nonsense Domain Names
Ever since I originally noticed that Apple was registering nonsense domain names, I have been intrigued about why they would be registering and then not renewing nonsense domain names. And it’s not just one or two domain names, or a dozen of them.
This time, Afilias Special Projects has registered 1862 new domain names in the past 24 hours, which is a significant amount of domain names. Registration fees alone for 1800 .info domain names would be at least $15,000. These new domain names, are all .info domain names, and are pointed to the Apple.com name servers, just like the other nonsense domain names I’ve been following. [Read more…]
Apple Deletes Over 500 Domain Names
Apple has deleted over 500 domain names this week, and decided not to renew these domain names. Most of these domain names were registered by Apple exactly one year ago, and after coming up for renewal they have not renewed them. [Read more…]
7Search, Others, Accused of Traffic Stealing in Domain Parking Research Paper
7Search, a leading Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising and Affiliate Network, along with a few other search and domain parking companies, have been accused of traffic stealing in eye-opening research paper titled Understanding the Dark Side of Domain Parking.
The paper, presented at the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium, was researched and written by Sumayah Alrwais, Indiana University Bloomington and King Saud University; Kan Yuan, Indiana University Bloomington; Eihal Alowaisheq, Indiana University Bloomington and King Saud University; Zhou Li, Indiana University Bloomington and RSA Laboratories; XiaoFeng Wang, Indiana University Bloomington. [Read more…]
Google Activates Their First New gTLD Domain Name
Google has activated their first New gTLD domain name, which is nic.google. Nic.Google currently redirects to the Google Registry.
Facebook Acquired Messenger.com
It appears that Facebook acquired Messenger.com recently. Checking the name servers and the whois data for Messenger.com, there was a recent change to the name servers: from lovellsnames.org to facebook.com, and the registrant is now Facebook. [Read more…]
Registering Domain Names with Google Domains
For a few months now, I have had the opportunity to have access to the Google Domains program, where you can buy (and transfer in) domain names. Google has been a domain name registrar for many, many years now, but has only recently opened up their registrar services to the public. Like many Google products, they first go through an “invite only” process. I thought that I’d tell you about my experience with Google Domains so far, and how it’s been going. [Read more…]
New gTLD Domain Name Forum Launched
A New gTLD Domain Name forum has recently launched. The site, called gTLD.Link, is your everything link to the gTLDs. I’ve recently joined the forum, and so far have made several helpful connections through the site.
As you may know by now if you haven’t been following my blog, I’m a big fan of the new gTLD domain names, and especially the keyword-rich opportunities they provide. For example, I personally think that a domain name like “3Carat.Diamonds” is much “better” than “3CaratDiamonds.com”. The first one is much shorter, easier to remember, and the keywords are split up by the dot in the name. [Read more…]
GoDaddy Price Confusion Over Premium New gTLD Domains
There appears to be a bug in how GoDaddy is displaying the prices of some New gTLD domain names. At one point, depending on how you search for the domain name, the price will display as one price: but if you search for a .com domain name, then GoDaddy’s site is showing a different price for the same domain name. Here’s an example of this.
Don’t Try to Sell a Celebrity Their Domain Name on Twitter
Would you be interested in buying DeadMau5.co and Mau5Trap.co ? I can provide proof of ownership. @deadmau5
— ToodyNoodlez (@McQuakenbake)
There are several reasons that I can come up with right off the top of my head why you shouldn’t try to sell a celebrity a domain name on Twitter. Especially if that domain name is their brand or their name. And especially if you’re a cyber squatter, looking to profit by selling the domain name. If you didn’t know, cybersquatting is illegal in the United States. And you could end up having to pay $1,000 to $100,000 per domain name as a penalty. if you’re found guilty of cybersquatting.
Chad McFatridge, who goes by the Twitter handle @McQuakenbake, posted on Twitter that he owns the domain names deadmau5.co and mau5trap.co. He sent a tweet to the famous celebrity @deadmau5: [Read more…]
Is .Com Better than a New gTLD Domain Name?
New gTLD market share courtesy ntldstats.com
As you may be aware, if you read my blog regularly, you probably know by now that I’ve been a fan of the new gTLD domain names, especially keyword rich ones, since they were first introduced. It seems as though you either really love the new gTLD domain names and see the opportunities they provide, or you don’t like them. I’ve run across quite a few people who just don’t like the new gTLD domain names. Some say that their value is limited, and others have event told me that they will fail. [Read more…]
Apple’s Mystery Domain Names Now Say Hello
A while back, I wrote about Apple’s mysterious non-sensical domain names that were hosted on Amazon’s Cloud servers. That post was picked up by Gizmodo. Well, I noticed today, a day before the big Apple event, that may or may not include news about the new Apple iPhone 6, iOS 8, Apple NFC, and the Apple iWatch, those non-sensical domain names are saying this:
Why they’ve been switched from being a simple server default landing page to one that actually includes content (Hello being the content), is kind of interesting. Those sites are still up and running, and I bet they have something to do with Apple’s announcements on September 9th. [Read more…]