Domainer's Gazette-Home

not sure how long it’s been available, but GoDaddy is now offering a mobile bidding platform for its domain auction system, TDNAM - the Domain Name After Market. I made a quick blog request to Snapnames about a month back, in regards to creating this type of app, but nothing so far. Nice to see GoDaddy working to meet the needs of domainers who are quite frequently ‘out-of-the-office’..

Visit the new site here or here

Paul Sloan of Business 2.0 and Michael Arrington of TechCrunch are duking it out over Michael’s asinine comment, “the extremely dirty domain name business.”

Paul has one of our favorite blog reads, and notably pointed out that Michael used to run Pool.com, an after market auction site for domain names.. Arrington has yet to comment on that..

Network Solutions is quietly promoting some SEO services I find quite wrong.. After acquiring a domain yesterday, I logged in to change its DNS settings. Directly above my newly acquired name, this promotion caught my eye:

Get top 10 rankings in search engines like Google® and Yahoo®! — Guaranteed!

Now, initially I was saying,”yeah, you can get me top 10 listings within *paid search* on goog and y! by bidding $10 a click.” But they weren’t talking about paid, they’re talking about organic SEO.

“Search engine optimization of your home page and key landing pages. 20 targeted keyword phrases delivering at least 5 listings in the Top 10 results on major search engines”.

Wanna know what they’re most *inexpensive* rate was for the guaranteed package?

$2,800.00 ($5,800 was the most expensive)

after I slapped my forehead, I began to ask, “what do they consider ‘major search engines’?”

their response in fine print:

Network Solutions will only submit keywords to search engines in the United States. The search engines included are: AOL, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Ask.com (formerly known as AskJeeves), Google, Hotbot, IWon, Looksmart, Lycos, MSN, Netscape, and Yahoo!.

then, within the fine print as well, I discovered this doozy:

This service(s) does not guarantee any sales or traffic to your Web site.

So, imagine yourself working at a small business, say a plumbing company in Smyrna GA (the type of business they’re targeting here), where any-and-all marketing and advertising dollars are spent to generate revenue and leads. You’ve heard about all this SEO stuff, and how it can open a flood gate of traffic & sales to your business website, but you have no clue on how its done. Assume you sign up, stars in your eyes, your boss is gonna love you when he sees the latest quarter of sales performance..

According to Netsol, they’ll contractually deliver on their promise if they deliver this:

2 of your website pages appearing in the industry leading seach engine Hotbot, and the other three pages in Lycos, all at 10th position..

so, if you were following along, and imagined yourself working at that small business, you’d be fired right now for blowing $2,800.

just a follow up post on the domain rubberneck.com going up for auction. My off-the-cuff guess was in the $35K range, as I expected vaxis and benfranklin to duke it out. Benfranklin bowed out at $2,028, and Vaxis jumped ship at $2,088, though, and there were no more strong takers, so it sold for a pretty cheap price - in my opinion. Bonkerstwo snapped it up at the end. Nice grab.

Business 2.0 just published a great in-depth article about the entire domaining industy, highlighting Kevin Ham’s rise to power in the world of domainers. They also had a shout out to one of our personal favorite domainer’s, Frank Schilling. He made a quick remark on his blog, in regards to this article as well, found here.

it’s amazing to remember when this industry was somewhat hush-hush, and to now see articles like this singing its praises..

Read Article Here

Like the auction for rubberneck.com, Petitions.org appears to be headed for auction at Snapnames. The auction starts on 6/1/2007, so be sure to join that specific auction prior to that date. Enjoy the fracas!