Domainer's Gazette-Home

ok, another non-domaining rambling..

get this.. it’s s few months late, but the story just resurfaced today..

that TB guy that flew around the globe. He’s now getting sued..

I went to High School with him .. crazy, huh? ..he was a few grades below me..

wanna see a picture when he was in 9th grade?

maybe CNN will pay me some scratch for this photo…

I’ve witnessed several first hand instances where domain owners accidentally fall asleep at the wheel and fail to renew their domains. That is, falling asleep on domains & websites they actively use and update.

My heart always goes out to them cause it’d be a terribly painful experience for me to lose a domain I own and manage.

In most of these cases, the previous domain owner fails to receive a renewal notice from their registrar (either because they didn’t update their email address, or the email itself got tossed into some bulk spam folder). After that, they simply forget. When it does expire, some owners rescue them during the grace period, but have to pay extra. But imagine if they went out of town during that period, or got slammed at their 9-5, and failed to check the site out for a while..

I can personally say this… I get queasy when *any* of my domain registration periods fall under a 12 month time frame. In my opinion, it doesn’t make much sense to not register a domain you’re passionate about for less than 3 years. Why not, you know? 3 years will set you back $30 bucks (basically). And why trust auto-renew to determine the fate of your domain each year… I’d rather be the one physically extending or canceling a domain registration.

So I decided to do an audit. An audit on what? On a few seo/sem/ppc/domaining websites I visit regularly through my RSS feed. I wanted to know how long some of these folks had registered their domains, and how close they were to their expiration dates.

A majority I researched (through DomainTools) were fine, and had registration dates for more than 3 years (ie. SEO Book, Tropical SEO, DomainTools, DomainNameWire). I did uncover a few, though, with less than 12 month left on their registration - even some that are about 5 months away..oye. I’m not doing this to “call someone out”, I just wanted to provide a friendly reminder. They’re probably well aware that their domains needs to be renewed, but who knows. Anybody can lose a domain, and I’d rather not have it happen to the fine bloggers on this list:

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dailydomainer.com — expires on 10/17/2007

domainnamenews.com — expires on 10/27/2007

seroundtable.com — expires on 12/4/2007

conceptualist.com — expires on 12/18/2007

tony-hill.net — expires on 12/22/2007

webguerrilla.com — expires on 12/28/2007

pronetadvertising.com — expires on 1/30/2008

stundubl.com — expires on 3/9/2008

scoreboard-media.com — expires on 4/27/2008

mikeindustries.com — expires on 5/6/2008

searchenginejournal.com — expires on 6/11/2008

wolf-howl.com — expires on 6/19/2008

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think I got those dates right..let me know if I messed any up..

and on that note, I need to extend domainersgazette.com for an additional few years, just to be on the safe side…

I’m sitting here researching a story to post a little later today, and ran a whois search*on* Domain Tools *for* the domain domaintools.com.

and, I’m familiar with ascii drawing, but how the hail (how they say ‘hell’ in the South) did they get this to show up on their WhoIs record? All domainersgazette.com says is my name, address, all that typical boring stuff..

(had to include an image cause the code kept getting messed up when I cut and pasted):

I’m very jealous, and I want a pretty image on my WhoIs record too..

I’m an odd breed of domainer, and it occured to me today what type of breed I am …

we’ve already gone over types of domainers, but breed is a little different..

I don’t spend much of any time chasing dictionary, 2 letter, 3 letter, etc. domains. Too expensive. And there’s no reason to chase after trademarked terms, as you’d obviously be waiting for a lawsuit to occur (it’s fun to research the arena though - to see how black hat some folks get).

Like I’ve said before, I chase domains for their traffic, and to do this effectively, it’s wise to have some exposure to the seo game.

I’m basically a domainer with a slight seo slant.. an SEOmainer you could say..

The SEOmainer’s Gazette? nah..

leasenet.com sold for $3,700, won by bidder ‘dmndotcom’

hookedontheoutdoors.com sold for $775, won by bidder ‘topbids’

ok, a quick departure from the world of domaining..

you *know* it’s a slow news day when Yahoo features this kind of story on their homepage:

stop the presses. “Cool” has no age limit.