Every year at the NamesCon domain name conference, ROTD (Right of the Dot) holds a live domain name auction. This year they’ve picked 641 premium domain names to run in the auction–only the best from that list will be auctioned off live at the event this year in Las Vegas. The domain names are currently up for auction at Namejet, who is listing the domains. You can bid on them right now, right here. Some have a reserve price, but others don’t. At a minimum bid of $300, there are definitely some good buys to be had. [Read more…]

The domain name Files.com recently sold for US $750,000 according to Domain Name Wire. Action Verb, LLC bought the domain name Files.com and, according to the landing page on the site, they plan on launching “powerful file management for businesses of every size”. Certainly $750,000 is a lot of money to spend, and it is a great domain name. But did Action Verb, LLC, do any due diligence on the domain name before they bought it? [Read more…]

Does Domain Name Registration Length Affect Search Engine Rankings?

This has been discussed time and time again, but since Epik is now offering Forever Registrations of domain names, I thought that I would ask Google’s John Mueller if domain registration length is a search engine ranking factor. Or, whether or not Google prefers domain names that have been registered for a longer period of time. I asked John on Twitter, and here’s what he said: [Read more…]

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…]

A recent discussion about the best Domain Name industry Twitter accounts got me thinking–there are a lot more domain name influencers on Twitter than be put into one Tweet. Even though there are a lot of characters available in a Tweet now, I just cannot possibly put them all into one or two Tweets. So, here’s my list of 35 domain name influencers that you should follow on Twitter–right now. Then, after that list below, I’ve listed a bunch of Twitter accounts that you should be following related to the domain name industry–that you’re not. [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…]