Domain Front-Running Story at WebProNews

Domain Frontrunning is called a "Protection Practice" by Network Solutions and is discussed a domain frontrunning article by Jason Miller of WebProNews, and is interviewed on the SEO101 show from WebmasterRadio.fm with hosts Caroline Shelby and David Brown talking about the practice of reserving domains that are searched, but not purchased at the NetSol site. ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC) frontrunning study (PDF) determined that Network Solutions was indeed doing that.

domain frontrunning SEO 101 | The Beginning SEO Podcast - Domain Frontrunning

If you'd like to skip the unrelated stuff, the domain conversation is from 10:30 to the 15 minute mark, then the commercials run until 17:00 minute mark until the 21:30 mark, a total of eight minutes of the good stuff.

NetSol admitted to the practice and backed off of it, but continues their "Protection Program" suggesting that if you call them, they would cancel the "Hold" they had placed on your searched domains OR that you could use their "Whois" search to find out if a domain was available without triggering the "Protection Program" or as we know it - front-running.

Apparently ICANN received over 150 complaints on the practice and determined that only a portion were actual cases of Frontrunning. This is month-old news, but interesting to hear it discussed by Miller, who thoroughly researched the article for WebProNews.

Digital Brand Management: Domains Intellectual Property

An Australian domain name registrar called Melbourne IT has acquired Verisign's business assets for their Digital Brand Management Services (DBMS) for just over US $50 million. Melbourne IT began their stake in the internet domain registrar business with a near lock on registration of dot com dot au domains in the 90's and have been publicly traded on the Australian stock exchange since 1999. This puts 4500 "Premium" accounts and nearly a half million domain names under an Aussie company... that has offices worldwide, including US.

Why not Use Google Product Blog Domain Names?

In a continuing look at Google-owned Domain Names this week, I'd like to look at a few tidbits that I've found regarding the word "Blog" in domains monitored and protected by MarkMonitor.com for Google. Yesterday we reviewed a few "Android" SDK domain names Google has set aside - and only that - set aside. They don't resolve to anywhere and are clearly being held to prevent others from reserving them.

Here are some more like that. Google has got dozens of blogs on just as many topics, all hosted by BlogSpot (which you can't go to directly, only to subdomains - Blogspot.com redirects to Blogger.com (Sheesh!). I've always wondered why. Why, when Google has plenty of resources and hires MarkMonitor to protect their trademark and intellectual property rights, do they not acually USE those domains they reserve - at least the ones that could be used?

It seems absolutely bizarre to me that ADSENSEBLOG.com for example doesn't actually resolve to Google's Adsense Blog. Instead, they host it at http://adsense.blogspot.com/. Why is that they do the same with their Adwords Blog rather than hosting it at http://www.adwordsblog.com/?

Google owns no fewer than 24 dot com (.com) domains which include various Google product names, combined with the word "blog." Yet they don't host their blogs on those blog domains in most cases (I don't have time right now to check them all.)

Here are a couple more: quickly:

• GOGGLESEARCHBLOG.com again, at
• GOGGLEVIDEOBLOG.com

And hey - I'll bet they own the domain names for many, if not all of those Google Blogs listed down the shoulder of their "Official Google Blog" and shown in the partial screenshot here. (This is approximately HALF those listed on their blog) The question for me is - "Why don't they use the blog domain names they own?

Some Non-Blog domains that they own actually resolve to a site, like "Adsense.com actually works and redirects to the longer Google URL of https://www.google.com/adsense/ and Adwords.com actually works, again, redirecting to the longer Google URL of https://adwords.google.com/select/ What's up with that Google. You are an official domain registrar - yet you don't sell domain names yourself - but through partners, you own thousands and thousands of product related domains but don't use them but to redirect in a few cases - the rest don't resolve. We now know that the registrar data you can access is baked into your algorithm to assign ranking to domains of others. But why are you ashamed of your other domain names?

Google Android Mobile Domains vs Squatters

Last November, a site called Android Community posted a dicsussion thread titled "Squatting on Android Domains - Are You Guilty?" and then listed that Google had moved a large collection of Android based domain names to point at Google DNS servers (though none resolve to a destination as of this evening). These domains are all based on the name for Google's mobile phone operating system and "Software Developers Kit" called - what else - Android.

The Android Community owner, an Android enthusiast and apparent iPhone fan and retailer of accessories, Vincent Nguyen, admitted to having reserved a bunch of Android names himself.

So in line with yesterdays post about Google-owned domain names related to Google products being protected by Markmonitor.com for Google. I took a look at the thirteen Android related domain names on the long list of those domains posted by Pingdom.com and discussed here yesterday, then did a bit of standard web searches to find the Android discussion forum post mentioned above in which Nguyen lists the 26 additional dot net and dot org domains reserved by Google and protected by MarkMonitor.com.

Currently this list of domains all fail to resolve to any server.

androidalliance.com androidalliance.net androidalliance.org androiddevice.com androiddevice.net androiddevice.org androiddevices.com androiddevices.net androiddevices.org androidfederation.com androidfederation.net androidfederation.org androidhandset.com androidhandset.net androidhandset.org androidhandsets.com androidhandsets.net androidhandsets.org androidmobile.com androidmobile.net

androidmobile.org androidphone.com androidphone.net androidphone.org androidphones.com androidphones.net androidphones.org androidplatform.com androidplatform.net androidplatform.org androidsdk.com androidsdk.net androidsdk.org androidsoftware.com androidsoftware.net androidsoftware.org androidtechnology.com androidtechnology.net androidtechnology.org

My question for Google and MarkMonitor is why these and not the literally thousands of others that will no doubt be reserved by typo-squatters, enthusiasts and haters of Google, the Android mobile phone operating system, and plain opportunists looking for a few advertising dollars or domain parking income.

What is that determines those domains worth protecting and those that go unprotected and eventually fall to creative and quick domainers? Is this based on Google or MarkMonitor algorithms that suggest the most commonly searched domains? What makes MarkMonitor protect over 125 dot come (probably 375 including the .org and .net tld) domain names related to the Google IPO and only 39 related to the Android SDK? There must be a formula based on the amount of the cost to fight squatters for ownership through their expensive IP and trademark attorneys or in some cases costly court battles.

Who

Google Domain Names Owned Via MarkMonitor.com

Most web savvy types know that Google is an ICANN approved domain registrar - and even though they have publicly stated that they have no intention of selling domain names themselves, they can directly access domain records and monitor ownership data. This would come in handy to help them monitor pagerank and reset it when a domain changes hands, as has been said publicly by Google Anti-spam guru Matt Cutts a couple of times in the past six months.

This past week, performance monitoring site Pingdom.com posted an interesting list of Google-owned domain names in a blog post. They also posted an excel spreadsheet of domain names that point to Google DNS servers. That's not really useful as those could include sites not owned by Google, but hosted in one way or another by Google, such as those who purchase domain names through Google Apps.

(Those domains are not sold by Google, but registered seamlessly through several partner registrars, including GoDaddy and eNom). That list contains some odd adult web addresses which are clearly not owned by Google and doing whois checks is recommended before making assumptions about who owns those names on that list. Over the next few posts, we'll take a look at some of those names which hold some interest for what Google might be up to in the domain name space.

Google has used Domain Name Management firm MarkMonitor for trademark protection and brand management and shows as the registered owner of all Google domain names.

Domain Name: google.com

 Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
 Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
 Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

    Administrative Contact:
 DNS Admin (NIC-14290820)  Google Inc.
 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View CA 94043 US
 dns-admin@google.com +1.6506234000 Fax- +1.6506188571

Doing a whois lookup on any of those domain names on the list of over 2300 domain names Pingdom.com provided is a good idea to verify proper ownership. But one grouping of over 125 domains were clearly reserved prior to the August 2004 Google initial public offering to protect those from being registered by those hoping to profit by them. The really funny thing about that is that MarkMonitor.com obviously missed one - probably the one that got them to register the other 125 - and that domain name, www.google-ipo.com is a pretty good source of information on the IPO as can be seen from the screen shot below:

They went extreme on those they protected too, as one might guess with over 125 variations, it ranges from the obvious GoogleIPO.com to silly things that only LOOK like the word, but include number 1 for the L and zeros for one or both "O's" - like Go0g1e.com.

Enough of that - since the IPO is past and of little interest today, we'll move forward next time and look at some things that may have obvious meaning in Google's future.

GoDaddy Biggest Domain Registrar + 3 Million More

The headline here links to a Domain Name Wire story about GoDaddy Software as the top rated Registrar, but fails to note that on the list of top registrars is also a GoDaddy subsidiary called Wild West Domains which is set up as a reseller program allowing smaller sites to sell Domain names with full GoDaddy services. (Seen in the Graphic below are the numbers from this week.)

Here are the top three rated registrars in the Domain Name Wire Annual survey results (PDF).

1. GoDaddy 52%
2. Moniker 21%
3. eNom 13%

WebSite101 Domains is a proud reseller participating in the Wild West Domains reseller program, owned by GoDaddy and proudly lend our name as a reseller of their full line of great services.

ICANN's New Generic Top Level Domain Names (gTLD)

A new round of top level domains (TLD's) is being considered by the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) and they've posted a gTLD draft proposal evaluation flow chart (PDF) for "Discussion Purposes on the ICANN web site. The flow chart recommends a minimum of 18 steps to gain approval for a new gTLD as seen in the marked up version below:

OK, so new and existing registrars will be allowed to propose new gTLD's (new domain extensions such as .com, .net etc.) and submit them to an approval process which essentially breaks down into the following rules:

1. It should be good and not harmful/offensive
2. It should work for everyone politically and technically
3. Registrars should be able to perform and deliver flawlessly
4. Winning registrar pays the piper and gains approval

First here's the existing list of domain names, plus reference to the 258 two letter country name TLD's.

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Wow! I want to jump in there and offer up a few ideas and proposals of my own. Nevermind that I can't deliver, can't win the auction to sell my proposed names and all that. Wouldn't it be cool if we could just have our first name as a domain? So I'd reserve valentine.mike - You know Valentine (Dot) Mike - hey! Why not? That would really be delivering domain NAMES!