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.
I took some time to analyze the whole entire list of domains up for auction, and learned a lot about the names on the list. You may be just looking at the list and find one that fits your niche and your business or a business you’d like to start. After all, that’s how Warren got started in the Bobbleheads business, buy purchasing Bobbleheads.com at a live domain name auction. But me, being the SEO and domainer that I am, decided to look at the other side of each domain on this list–the hidden side, so to speak. I am the original inventor and creator of Verified Domains, a service that performs complete background checks on domain names. So I thought I’d put this Namescon domain name auction list to the test:
How many of these domain names will pass a background check and due diligence? What I found was eye-opening. Let’s put it this way:
Just because it is a great domain name doesn’t mean that it’s a clean, usable domain name.
Granted, all domain names can usually be cleaned up and are usable domain names. If a domain name has been trashed, burned, is banned, has spam associated with it, or has bad backlinks pointing to it, those all can be cleaned up. But it can take a LOT OF WORK and man hours to clean a domain name and make it usable again. But usable, I mean you’ll be able to put content on it, build a website, use it for ecommerce, the search engines will rank pages on it, and it’s not on email blacklists, for example. What I recommend is that you do a complete background check on a domain name before you buy it to fully understand what you’re getting into. That’s if you’re actually going to buy the domain name and put a website on it. Generally speaking, if you are buying it for investment purposes, then you wouldn’t need to do that–but making sure the domain is clean anyway would help reassure the next buyer.
Results of My Analysis
As I mentioned, I took a look at all of the domains that are currently listed on the Namejet.com ROTD listing, which is 641 domain names. Of the 641 domain names, I ran them through my Verified Domains system, and 38 of the domain names did not pass the verification process. That means that those 38 domain names would not become verified by Verified Domains, they would not pass the domain name background check. Some of these 38 domain names are what I personally would call great domains. But based on the data that I’m looking at, about half of those 38 domain names would require hundreds of hours of manual work in order to make them “clean enough” and usable under normal circumstances. That means if you’re going to put a website on them and expect to use that domain name for any sort of business (other than parking the domain name).
That means that about 6 percent of the domain names up for auction would not pass a proper domain name background check. That is concerning to me.
Here are some other stats about the list of domain names. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to single out or name any of the domain names that would not pass a proper domain name background check or would not qualify for the Verified Domains guarantee.
- 6 percent would not pass a domain background check.
- The top 10 domains, based on number of backlinks, have over 48,000 backlinks. The top 5 have over 1 million backlinks each. The top domain has over 3.4 million backlinks.
- The top 10 domains, based on Majestic.com Trust Flow, have a Trust Flow of over 21, with the top domain name having a Trust Flow of 50.
- The 2nd best domain name, based on Trust Flow, has some great links. It has a Trust Flow of 30 and has over 124,000 backlinks.
- The top domain name based on the most referring unique domain names appears to be a typo domain.
- Most of the domain names that are on the list tend to be made up of English language words. However, 235 of the 641 domain names have links primarily from languages other than English. That’s 36 percent of the domain names on the list.
Even though there are some interesting issues present with 6 percent of the domain names on the list, there are still some great domain names on the list. Even the ones that don’t pass a background check are still great domains. The only thing I can say is “buyer beware”, if you buy a domain name, or plan on bidding on one, then you should perform a background check.
Buyer beware.
