Verisign is shutting down their DomainScope service. They will continue operating the service until 1:00 PM Eastern Time on July 17, 2020. In a recent email to their current DomainScope customers and a notice posted on their site, Verisign explained that their product development teams will be focusing on developing new features and functionality for their NameStudio service instead.
“Dear DomainScope Customers,
We are writing to let you know that we’ve begun the process of discontinuing the DomainScope service as part of our continuing shift to focus on other Verisign products and services.
While we greatly appreciate your continued support of DomainScope, we’ve seen limited usage as customers have adopted other products. Our product development teams will be focusing on developing new features and functionality for our NameStudio service, which is designed to help registrars and resellers identify relevant domain name suggestions to provide to their customers.
In order to allow you to prepare for this transition, we will continue operating the DomainScope service until 1:00 PM Eastern Time on July 17, 2020 and will send additional reminders.
Thank you again for your use of the DomainScope service.
Please direct any questions that you may have relating to this notice to Verisign Support at DomainScope@verisign.com.
Best Regards,
Verisign Support”
I suspect that there was just not enough public use of DomainScope, which has been a great tool to find domain names. If you search for certain keywords and topics, you can find domain names that recently expired, for example. Then, you can see when they’re available for registration, the percent of US Monthly US Traffic, DNS Traffic Reach, Popularity Score, and the number of inbound links. Here’s an example:
In the example above, you can see that I searched for “work from home” because I am thinking of putting up a blog about working from. But I need a domain name. So, here are a few that DomainScope found:
doingworkfromhome .com (available in 1 day, 67 percent monthly US Traffic, 1102 DNS Traffic Reach, 34 Popularity Score, and 0 backlinks.)
vandykeglobalworkfromhome .com (available in 2 days, 63 percent monthly US Traffic, DNS Traffic Reach 940, 29 Popularity score, 0 backlinks.)
workfromhometravelmore .com (available in 5 days, 71 percent US monthly Traffic, 918 DNS Traffic Reach, 27 popularity score, 0 backlinks.)
I definitely would be picking the first one. I would check the backlinks using Majestic.com, though, as I’m not sure where they get their backlink data from. The 2nd one is maybe a branded keyword domain, so I’d stay away from that one. But the third one is probably a bit longer than I would like. So I’d pass on that one. This is just an example of the data that you can get, though, from DomainScope.
Other information that they may have about a domain name is:
- Inbound links
- Outbound links
- Website type
- Shopping Cart
- Third party checkout
- personal information
- advertisements
- redirect destination
- login
- brand safety
If you dig around a bit, you may be able to find sites with traffic, as well if that’s what you’re looking for.You can search for a keyword and sort by the traffic percentage, or even see a list of recently expired domain names bases on the number of links pointing to each domain. You can download the data, as well. For example, one particular domain name I found has 519,836 DNS Traffic reach. I believe that’s per month. That’s DNS traffic, though–not necessarily human visitors. It’s DNS lookups per month. Others have over 100,000 per month.
Well, I wish I had spent more time using DomainScope in the past few years, I’m sure I would have found some good domains there. You do have up until 1:00 PM Eastern Time on July 17, 2020 to use it.
