To be clear though, we are not pointing to TDNAM as a perpetrator with any involvement, rather they are merely the venue where  scammers are preying on unsuspecting victims. The sellers in a pump and dump are the scammers not the venues.  We are sure this happens at more than just TDNAM and don’t mean this article to suggest otherwise.  The links we were given show what is easily perceived as sellers engaged in “pumping and dumping” domain names being sold on TDNAM.  Anyone buying any domain names in the aftermarket on the basis of traffic numbers should be aware of this scam.

This activity can also occur outside of an aftermarket venue.  When selling a domain name in public, say on a forum, it’s common for sellers to receive requests from savvy domain investors to “test the traffic”.  The request is made in order to validate any claimed traffic.  It’s the domainer equivalent to due diligence.  Most sellers in this arena are also familiar with the practice.  Sellers know that they won’t be able to sell a domain that they pump with bogus traffic and not be caught.  The risk of being exposed on a public forum as a fraud are likely strong enough that this doesn’t occur very often.   Since whois records can be changed and new identities created easily, it is still possible to run this scam outside of the confines of an aftermarket platform.

An aftermarket platform, however, often provides even more unsuspecting buyers for the scammers to prey on and their terms give the sellers a shield to hide behind. TDNAM, like Sedo.com and other domain aftermarket venues, display domain traffic numbers in the auction details.  The problem with this information is that it is a fairly vague number and only the venues themselves know the details.  The source and  quality of this traffic is not reported and typically not guaranteed.  The TDNAM legal terms only mention this about traffic :

Some Expired Domain listings may include traffic data labeled as “Unique Visitors” (the “Traffic Data”). The Traffic Data is provided AS IS and for informational purposes only. The Traffic Data reflects internally calculated data and does not represent a guarantee of continued traffic in any way.

I was unable to find a terms of service disclaimer on Sedo, but I’m sure that the numbers they post are also not guaranteed.  Obviously, not guaranteeing traffic provides an “out” or protection that sellers can hide behind as they pump in as much traffic to a domain name.  When the domain is sold and the unsuspecting buyer realizes that there is no traffic coming to the domain, the venue and seller can simply reply “We don’t guarantee the traffic”.  This lack of any guarantees enables the pump and dump domain scam.

This is one of the reasons most savvy domainers who buy on aftermarket auctions follow the rule of caveat emptor (buyer beware), knowing full well that the numbers can’t  be relied upon.  What happens to the novice unsuspecting domain buyer ?  TDNAM, being  run by the largest domain registrar, likely has a customer base that is not primarily made up of savvy domainers and likely is unaware of these sorts of scams. To an unsuspecting buyer or novice, a domain with a reported high amount of traffic may seem very appealing.  There are likely far more unsuspecting buyers on these aftermarket sites which enables the scammer even more.

Need Some Evidence ?

So how do we know this is happening ?   Here’s two example domain names that are for sale on TDNAM as of this writing (Friday at 3 am cst) that seem to be “pumping and dumping” (see screen shot below).   Both names have sold in the process of writing this story. The  TDNAM numbers shows 1723 for the domain VideoGameSupermart.com and the domain Dvdroms.net reports 39097.

It’s interesting to note that the domains mentioned above are not expired domain names. The only mention of traffic in the terms of service on TDNAM that I could find (see above) talks about expired domain traffic not being guaranteed. Does that mean that they are guaranteeing the traffic numbers non-expired names listed on TDNAM?   I doubt these are guaranteed numbers and I’m guessing this omission in the TOS disclaimer will be fixed very soon. There’s a note on the auction page next to the traffic numbers that says “The traffic data is provided AS IS and for informational purposes only. The traffic data reflects internally calculated data and does not represent a guarantee of continued traffic in any way.”

Let’s look closer at Dvdroms.net though. The traffic numbers claim it is getting over 1000 uniques per day. That seems to be a stretch, but maybe it’s not. Where could this traffic be coming from ?   A former website with incoming links ?  Not likely based on a Google link check. Type-ins ?  I highly doubt it.  How about just buying up traffic before you put the domain on auction ?  Enter the company UGGIcorp.com, a company that sells traffic on the cheap.

Setting up and getting Traffic is fast and simple. We charge $2.000 per 3000 Unique Visit. We will review your website and will have it active within 1-12 hours. Make Sure Your site follows our terms. These Traffic Packages are not adsense safe unless it says so on the package.

UGGIcorp has a page on their website that displays how much traffic they’ve sent to various clients during the month (screen shot below in case it goes away).  It turns out that both Dvdroms.net and VideoGameSupermart.com appear on the list of domains that received this “pumping” of traffic in December.

SOLD !

Dvdroms.net ended up selling for $265 on TDNAM (sorry link not available).  If the seller bought 50k uniques worth of traffic, as the UggiCorp site seems to be saying, he likely paid around $30.  Add in the $10 paid for the domain, and you’ve got a nice profit of $225.  Videogamesupermarket.com was sent around $2 worth of traffic and sold for $69 .

Ok, so big deal. It’s only 2 domain names, right.  Wrong.
First, these aren’t the only names selling on TDNAM that appear on the UGGIcorp list. The same seller appears to be doing this with multiple domain names listed on TDNAM.  Secondly, these are only the ones we found that had some sort of evidence linking the bought traffic to domain names offered for sale.  Like cockroaches, once you’ve seen one scammer, rest assured there’s more hiding out somewhere.  I’m sure there are other sellers doing this same thing, but with a little more stealth. If not now, I’m sure after this post, the practice of pumping traffic to domains will be done with more discretion in the future.

To top off the story, the whois for the domain names that we mentioned seem to contain bogus information.  Another thing someone pointed out when we discussed this issue is that these domains all go to a Godaddy parking page.  Most PPC companies and search engines frown on traffic that is bought and pumped in to a landing page.  Do you think that the advertisers on that landing page want to pay for this sort of traffic ?  It’s a violation of terms to have bogus whois info and it’s a pretty safe bet that pumping in traffic to a lander is also a terms of service violation somewhere.

Buying domains on the aftermarket comes with risks.  Most savvy domainers know about this scam (possibly having been burnt by it before), but others might not.  Buyers need to be aware of these type of scams.  This example seems to be a clear case of “pump and dump” domain selling.   Hopefully, in the future something can be done on these aftermarket platforms to combat these scams.

Thanks to our friends at DomainAuctionCleaner.com for alerting us to this.

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Motson’s Mystery Domain Auction is auctioning off one mystery domain name valued at $10,000 over the course of 100 days.  The mystery domain will be revealed on day 50.  Bidding starts at .01 and Motson has a goal to reach a total take of $1,000,000.

$1 million for a $10,000 domain ?  You heard me right.  The trick here is that the domain will sell to 1 person for $10,000 whatever the final price is on the last day, but everyone else having paid in their bids prior in an all-pay auction format means that the total sum will be $1 million before Motson even reaches a bid of $150.  Pretty smart.

The accumulating auction process is explained on the sites FAQ page:

. . .the auction bid amount is incremented by $0.01 every time a new bid is placed (*). Because this is an all pay auction, the bids accumulate into a bulk total which by the time bidding reaches $147 will have passed $1,000,000.

Below is a projection of the minimum value accumulated as a result of bids reaching various amounts.
High bid Minimum accumulated value
$0.10 -> $0.55
$1 -> $50.50
$10 -> $5005
$20 -> $20,010
$30 -> $45,015
$40 -> $80,020
$50 -> $125,025
$147 -> $1,080,523

Each bidder also receives a link on the site in the “past bids” section .  We tossed in .64 and by the time we got this written up the auction was at .85 .  By the looks of it the links can be used for any sort of promotion and current links appear to be targeted to just about anything except adult sites.  This is a great idea and John’s creativity will likely be greatly rewarded.  I predict a slew of copy-cats coming on the heels of this as well. Hopefully for John 100 days is a long enough lead on any potential competitors.

Good luck bidders !  Check it out at MysteryDomainAuction.com

UPDATE : Just realized, if the auction reaches that $147 mark that means over 14,000 bids will have come in for the mystery name.  He’s got a long way to go.

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Dannen also buys in to the message that seems to be one propelling the introduction of new TLDs forward “the Web is running out of memorable domain names.”  Highly unlikely given the number of TLDs we currently have, language variations and made up words and names that are created every day.  Even the name ipod, a name he uses in his piece, meant nothing a mere 7 years prior.

Cyber squatters will suddenly have billions of new domain names to purchase for only a few dollars — no longer will they have to rely on buying domains more expensively secondhand. Trademark infringement suits will balloon from tens or hundreds of domains to thousands and tens of thousands.

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch follows up to the FastCompany piece, essentially stating that nobody really cares about all these new extensions.  Sure there will be squatters and speculators grabbing up a bunch of domains and it may keep the lawyers busy. We can however look at the history of the latest and greatest new TLD and see that this game is pretty much played out.  A new TLD needs an audience and type-ins and a reason for people to gravitate to it.

As Kincaid points out, people generally don’t navigate to these new TLDs through typeins contrary to what Dannen seems to be saying. The new TLDs are not recession proof in our opinion either.  How well are those .mobi aftermarket sales going right about now?  The Fortune article by Paul Sloan talking about domains as recession proof is clearly dated, given the downward trend that all in the domain space have been feeling.

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Thiele may wish to count his blessings in this case, considering Verizon was just recently awarded $50,000 each for the OnlineNic domain name squatting violations that were also default judgments.

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Our divestiture of our Internet property “www.yp.com” could adversely impact our revenues.

On November 5, 2008, we entered into an agreement to sell our Internet domain name “www.yp.com” to YellowPages.com for a cash payment of $3,850,000.

While this sale is not specifically for a domain name, Apparently this WAS a domain name only sale, so this definitely does provide for interesting discussion and speculation on the value of the YP.com domain name.

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Government watchdog JudicialWatch

Judicial Watch points out:

The agency specifically forbids political or campaign information on any “.gov” website as well as any tax-exempt, nonprofit organization that can engage in lobbying or political campaigning. Obama’s change site proudly features the Obama-Biden Transition Project, a 501c(4) organization that actively engages in lobbying and political campaigning. The website also uses Obama’s favorite invented term of Office of the President-Elect, which is definitely not an official government office.

It seemed to us that Judicial Watch was making a mountain of a mole hill here, so we looked a little harder at what was presented.

The US General Services Administration (GSA) is the government body which manages and allocates the use of the .gov domain name.  It makes sense that campaigning should be forbidden on government allocated domains, but DNN searched the GSA site to find where it forbids this and was unable to find the specific rule.  In fact the rules we did found, leave the allocation open for interpretation and flexible.

According to the GSA website the following entities are permitted use of a .gov domain name :

• At the federal level, U.S. governmental departments, agencies, programs, and commissions
• Cross-agency collaborative organizations
• Federally recognized Indian Tribes (for the -NSN.GOV domain)
• State government entities and programs
• Cities and townships represented by an elected body of officials
• Counties and parishes represented by an elected body of officials
• Some special exceptions and requests are permitted

It is likely that the Obama team was granted the waiver and use of this domain under the “special exceptions and requests” .  Page 6 of the documents on Judicial Watch (PDF) also point out that the Office of the President-elect is federally recognized and that the GSA is authorized to provide services for this “unique entity that is entitled to government support while retaining characteristics of a private organization.”

Granting the domain seems pretty cut and dry to us, but not illegal.  The use of the domain name moving forward may be one which raises some questions with government watch dog groups.  However, it was not clear to us where on the Change.gov website any campaigning or lobbying was being done.  If the domain is used inappropriately, clearly this should be fixed, but JudicialWatch really provided no concrete proof of any such claims.

The only interesting tidbit I found in all of this was the fact that the request to use Change.gov was made on October 20th, weeks before the election had been decided.  It appears that the campaign wanted to use the domain, and this may have been the reason for the original refusal. It appears that once he was elected, the domain name request was approved.

[Thanks to reader Tyger Gilbert of USAWebAdv.com for the tip.]

UPDATE :  A user on Digg points out that the letter requesting the domain  shows no sign of “demands” or “pressuring”, but merely states that they are requesting a waiver for the use.  He also points out that Judicial Watch is headed by Conservatives. No real surprise here.

For those unfamiliar with the terminology, reverse domain name hijacking is defined on wikipedia as “the practice of inequitably unseating domain name registrants by accusing them of violating weak or non-existent trademarks related to the domain name.”  In essence what we seem to be seeing here is a similar case of someone trying to unseat a Twitter user, or a case of reverse user name hijacking on Twitter.  According to Stepan Mazurov of Room 214 “once it goes through . . . we have to protect it”, which seems to imply that they plan to move forward with requesting Twitter give them the user name.

Rose weighed in on this issue and posted a Seesmic video opening up the discussion. As of this writing, there were 12 video replies posted back with varying opinions on the matter, none seem to be from a legal expert, yet.  We suspect more to come as this issue rises to the surface.  Chris Hadley points out the similarities user names have with domain names and how users losing Twitter accounts can become a real nightmare. “What protection do we have over our Twitter accounts . . .  if this guy loses his Twitter account to this company, how do you protect yourself”.

Twitter’s policy states in barebones terms that they reserve the right to take user names and give them to another entity :

We reserve the right to reclaim usernames on behalf of businesses or individuals that hold legal claim or trademark on those usernames.

Under this policy what happens when you have a generic user name and someone has a trademark on that term, or if your company name or even intials are the same or as another company name ?  There are multiple trademarks for the word United, so which user has the “rights” to that user name under this vague policy?  It seems to be whomever Twitter feels like giving it to.  Will the Twitter account @bmw be given to the auto maker when they come knocking ?

DNN issued our view on the matter in our previous post and it reflects a sentiment similar to what Hadley said

“Just like domain name owners, social media users don’t want the hassle and uncertainty of having to wonder whether their name will be taken away.  Surely, the social media companies don’t want to be in the middle of the disputes either.  Refering to the history of domain names as an example, it would be a safe wager that lawsuits and arbitration over user names is right around the corner.  It would be best for these social media companies to get ahead of the issue as soon as possible and make the user names even more like domain names by providing some level of security and stability to their users.”

(c) 2008 DomainNameNews.com

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One has to wonder why OnlineNic,  a US based registrar, failed to negotiate settlement terms or even participate in the legal proceedings like others who have been sued by Verizon. Verizon representatives point out

OnlineNIC did not appear in court or send a lawyer to defend against the charges.

OnlineNic has a US presence and a US address listed in the whois. However, I believe the company is owned by parent company China Channel based in China.  I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know the intricacies of collecting on a judgment like this.  I imagine that their presence in the US makes them just as susceptible to suit as any other company.  Anyone of our readers in the legal arena care to comment ??

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Both Alexa and Quantcast give you a wonderful possibility to download a table of the top 1 million most popular web-sites. Some time ago Alexa’s top was a paid service, now it is free.

Download Alexa Million here
and
Quantcast Million here.

Make sure you bookmark this page so that you could come back and download the updates.

Why are Quantcast and Alexa ranking different?

Because they are using different algorythms to gather traffic data. Quantcast’s data is more accurate because they have a line of code embedded in majority of their quanted web-sites while Alexa gathers data from users who have installed Alexa toolbar on their browsers. That means - if you are visited only by users who don’t have an Alexa toolbar, you won’t get any ranking at all. Yet, it is very interesting to look at both tops and compare the data.

What’s the point?

For me it is interesting from domain name appraisal point of view. I usually look at top 500,000 to 1 million results to see which domains rock and rule. It is no good basing domain name appraisal only on this factor alone though.

Newbies can grasp what topics and niches are popular at this very moment from these web-site lists.

I hope you will find these lists useful.

Sahar Sarid wrote about  “Your name = Your brand“, citing examples of several domain name industry veterans who did or did not own their name in .com   While domain names remain a powerful vehicle for controlling personal branding, the growth in social media is also increasing the importance of other forms of naming.  As we pointed out earlier, user names on social media platforms are already being compared to domain names. If protecting your personal name is important in .com, it should be just as important to protect your name on the new social media sites.According to InsideFacebook, Facebook is growing by 600,000 new members per day , many domainers I know are just now hopping on board.  It’s taken time for many domainers to get involved in Linkedin, myspace, meebo or any number of other social networks as well.  Another perfect example, last year was really the year that the whole blogging thing sunk in with domainers.  A majority of the blogs you read today in the domain space (with the exception of dnjournal and domainnamewire) were created last post 2007.  Add DNN to that list.

Like other domainers,  I stepped in to these new arenas slowly as well.  A joiner rather than a leader maybe.  I wasn’t really interested in YASMN (yet another social media network) or more work writing at first, but now I’m beginning to see value in personal branding on these sites. Plus, why miss the boat again? Domainers should know better. They aren’t necessarily active in the internet or community other than the domain space maybe, but they should be able to recognize online opportunities.

It might be argued that these  emerging social media sites don’t have the commercial applications and domainers can’t really get anything out of them.  However, if you are an early adopter, your concern isn’t necessarily always about what is possible now, but rather what could be possible in the future and growing with the new technology.  Early adopters take risks and “buy-in” before the masses and often before a commercial application is apparent. Sound like domains a little?  In the case of these services, the “buy-in” is simple and best of all free. There really is no excuse.   Early adopters should recognize the importance of securing “your” name on these sites at the bare minimum.

We’re going to look more closely at Twitter.com as another example. Unlike Facebook where there can be dozens of Adam Strongs, Twitter accounts are based on unique user-names, so there’s only one @adamstrong available.  Sound familiar?  Many of the best generic word user names have been snatched up already and personal names are going rapidly as well.   Don’t worry though if you haven’t signed up yet either, you aren’t alone. It’s really no surprise at this point but the majority of the top 100 global haven’t secured or aren’t using a Twitter user name that reflects their brand, with many of their names locked up or “squitted” (squitted is the term that is being used for people who are “squatting” on Twitter user names)  by someone else.

DNN searched to see what domainers were on Twitter using the names that Sahar pointed out in his previous post.  I used this list to make the comparison easy. I know many domainers reading this may be on Twitter already, but I also knew already that many more below were not.

Why aren’t the thought leaders in the domain space also early adopters in other emerging internet media? Many domainers have yet to adopt these new formats even to protect their own personal names. If domainers were truly early adpoters, you’d think that more than 50% of the names below would have been secured by the matching domainer.

@FrankSchilling - Not taken
@sevenmile (the name of schillings blog) - Not taken

@RickSchwartz - A realtor named Rick Schwartz grabbed it

@KevinHam -  Taken but not in use. May be squitted

@SaharSarid  - Not taken

@ChristHartnett - Not taken

@LawrenceNg - Taken but not in use. May be squitted

@LarryFischer - Not taken

@AdamStrong - yeah it’s mine.

@AriGoldberger - not taken

@JayWesterdal - surprisingly Not Taken

@AdamDicker - Taken by “The” Adam Dicker, but not really in use

@BobParsons - Squitted

@ChadFolkening - Not taken

@ColinYu - Not taken

@MikeMann - Taken, but not by the former Buydomains owner

@ChrisChena - Not taken

@AmmarKubba - Not taken

@ColinPape - Used by “the” Colin Pape

@IsabelWang -  Used by “the” Isabel Wang . she’s not really a domainer though per se

What about some of the major domain companies ?

@snapnames - taken, not in use

@moniker - taken, not in use

@oversee - not taken

@domainsponsor - not taken

@fabulous - controlled by an individual not Fabulous.com

@godaddy - taken, not in use

@enom - not taken

@namedrive - controlled by Namedrive.com but not really being used

@namemedia - Not taken

@buydomains -  Buydomains controls not actively posting

@namecheap - Definitely using Twitter to the fullest potential

Here’s a list of some other domainers/companies I know who are on Twitter.
Forgive me if I leave you out
@frankmichlick - Frank Michlick
@dotsauce - Mark Fulton
@joedavison - Joe Davison
@domainbuyer - Ron James
@ronsheridan - Ron Sheridan
@donnamahoney- Donna Mahoney

@domainnamenews - DNN.com
@domainnamewire - Looks like Andrew jumped on board today
@dnjournal Ron Jackson got on board today too
@foap - Jothan Frakes
@namecheap - Namecheap has been giving away domains and hooking up users of Twitter to their domain accounts for updates.
@namedotcom - Name.com

There’s a good amount of domainers on Facebook and Linkedin as well and even a few groups for domainers on both sites.  It might be worth taking a look and getting involved in  these  social media platforms.

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Through the request of “Transfer Blocking”, the owner of a domain name will be able to prevent the change of registrant is the registration, for which he/she will need to request an authorization code.

Likewise, through a request of unblocking, also the restriction can be taken out and allow a transfer. This can be done once the person requesting this shows proof of identity and without this the petition will not be admitted.

Juan Enrique Sánchez S.
President
NameAction.com
Domains Latinamerica.

He mentioned that the .SCO (or .SCOT) domain names would be a good choice not only for the people of Scotland but also for the Scots living abroad. Especially it would matter if ICANN approved the new TLD in 2009 - it is going to be the official Come Home Year for Scots.

The campaign for Scots own domain name was launched back in 2005. Initially it was proposed to use .SCO extension for the new TLD but as time passed many people felt that .SCOT would be more appropriate. If you consider the pronunciation of .SCO, it could really be confused for .CO; the recent proposition makes more sense. There is nothing wrong with 4-letter domain name extensions. The internet already has .INFO, .MOBI, .NAME and others. A public poll that was carried out as part of a research shown that 59% of respondents supported .SCOT while only 14% would prefer .SCO.

Now the Scottish domain name concept looks more and more real than before. The Scottish Government has already created a dedicated working group that deals with technical and administrative questions. dotSCO campaign is helping to prepare the necessary documentation to submit an application at the nearest ICANN meeting, possibly as early as March 01, 2009.

However there’s a catch. The site should be indexed in order to factor it into domain name appraisal. Unfortunately, majority of buy-as-investment domains have been parked or just left inactive. Here comes the sad bit.

If you buy a domain name that has been registered back in 1998 but has never been indexed by search engines, it is just like buying a fresh domain name. You will spend your first year in the sandbox!

The same goes with domains that had dropped long time ago. Google has kicked it from its index and forgotten about it. Even if Archive.org shows that it has some history on the domain, it doesn’t count in domain name appraisal.

I will say it again: parking is a bad idea, a BAAD idea!!! You feed your parking company and leave yourself in a very disadvantageous situation. Whereas if you built a micro-site for each of your domain name, you would earn more from ads and you would build age, credibility and price. Then when you decided to sell the site and ask for domain name appraisal, you would be given a much nicer estimate! Remember that parked domains almost never get indexed and don’t build the age factor. Micro-sites do! Besides you keep all your revenue!

Dropped Names - to Buy or Not

Definitely, don’t discount dropped domain names. Just learn to tell the good from the bad.

How to say if a dropped domain is any good:

• It has a genuine Google PageRank. Use SeoQuake toolbar to determine that. Explore Yahoo Linkdomain and compare the PR with the number and quality of backlinks. If you find a PR3 site with zero or only a couple of backlinks, it is a fake PR.
• Google has retained the domain and at least some sub-pages in its index. If the site has been kicked out of the index, domain age doesn’t count any more. You are buying just another fresh domain name that will spend the next year in the sandbox.
• Look it up on Archive.org. If it had looked like a normal business website, you should be OK. You are trying to find the shameful past of that domain name. Has it hosted *orn, junk or excessive links?

Not every domain will have its value increased with age. Don’t bother with parked domains, inactive domains and ones that have been banned or removed from Google index (unless it is a one-word, a keyword or any other unmissable brilliant kind of name). If you are doomed to spend a year in a sandbox, don’t spill a fortune on it, you might as well pick a fresh name for a reg fee.

Bottomline

So, is age a factor in domain name appraisal? Yes, yes and yes. An aged domain gives you PageRank, residual traffic and credibility, but… There is a but! A parked domain will usually give you no advantage over a fresh name even if it is 10 years old.

The Sunrise period of .TEL domain names is designed for trademark and brand holders to protect their name. If you qualify, you can pre-register your domain name now and save it from cybersquatters and fraudsters.

To register your TEL trademark, go to Telnic Registrars for a full list of participating registrars. Pick the one you want but let me remind you once more that if you register your TEL domain name with a registrar that is not accredited by Telnic, you are throwing your money and your trademark in the wind! Use common sense.

The companies that have already pre-registered their TEL names are Apple, Sony, British Airways, Starbucks, Lamborghini and many many others. Have you?

Despite of active online community and enormous popularity of some Russian web projects, the .RU has failed to show good sales credentials when it comes to aftermarket.

One of the most disappointing sales was that of vodka.ru - a domain name that was predicted to fetch more than $100,000 was eventually sold for mere $10,000 in a private sale.

There are some medium-sized .RU domain name sales made lately. Handmade.ru was sold for $31,364 and goPoker.ru fetched $6,741 in 2007. The yummy soup.ru sold for $6,409 in 2006. All those three domain sales were carried out by SEDO.

As more and more businesses in Russia go online, it is likely that we will see more big Russian domain name aftermarket deals in the future.

• Brazil (.br) –> 22.297 domain names.
• Argentina (.ar) –> 18.132 domains.
• Chile (.cl)–> 2.862 domains.
• Venezuela (.ve) –> 1.318 domains.

The ccTld with higher percentage growth were:

• Granada (.gd) –> 6.67%
• Peru (.pe) –> 2.70%
• Republica Dominicana (.do) –> 2.59%
• Bolivia (.bo) –> 2,57%

The ccTlds`s with lower percentage growth were:

• Haiti (.ht) –> 0.00%
• Cuba (.cu) –> 0.07%
• Barbados (.bb) –> 0.10%.

The ccTlds`s with negative percentage growth were:

• Honduras (.hn) –> -0.83%
• Mexico (.mx) –> -0.53%

The negative growth of Honduras can be explained because they are checking their data base and many unpaid domain names were deleted.

The first four countries in the region in relation with total amount of domain names registered up until October are:

• Argentina (.ar) –> 1.767.273
• Brazil (.br) –> 1.497.893
• Mexico (.mx) –> 278.544
• Chile (.cl) –> 227.738

Up until October Latin America has 4.062.036 domain names in total. Properly counted it only represents a growth of 1.14% comparing with the previous month.

Comments and facts:

Brazil beats Argentina in domain names growth in absolute and relative values.

In general the region has had a lower growth compared with the past months.

October has proven to be a month with minimal growth of domains in Latin America.

Source: LatinoAmerICANN

Juan Enrique Sánchez S.
President – NameAction
Domains Latinamerica
jesanchez(at)nameaction.com

It will be one of the few .MOBI dropcatchers operating on the web. As with all other backorders, it will be free of charge to place a dropping MOBI backorder, you will have to pay only after Pool has secured the domain for you.

To access the daily drop data, log on to Pool and either search by keywords or download the delete lists.

It is unlikely, though, that Pool MOBI dropcatcher will become hugely popular because this TLD is still struggling to really kick off.

The second phase of Sunrise period is to be run from Tuesday 10 February, 2009 until Thursday 26 February, 2009 and is intended for trademark owners.

After all the trademark issues has settled, on 17 March, 2009 (going on until 31 March, 2009) starts the Landrush domain registration period. Top quality and generic domains will be granted to those who have pre-registered their interest (at an extra fee depending on the registrar you go with).

All the leftovers will be distributed during the Go Live period that starts on Wednesday 15 April, 2009. If you are currently holding a .NL domain name, act now. Go to see the list of accredited .CO.NL registrars and submit an application.

This second level domain is a good idea. NL is recognizable worldwide and the combination .CO.NL looks familiar due to the striking success of similar domain name extensions of .CO.UK, .CO.NZ and .CO.JP. This new domain is available to anyone (you don’t have to be Dutch to register it) and is operated by EuroDNS, the organization behind the .EU domain name.

It covers all the best practices such as Titles, Descriptions, URL structure, content and other things. The two perhaps most interesting parts of this small book (hey, you top SEO experts, you sometimes forget about this as well) are: stuff that explains “Nofollow” attribute once for all (I’ll punch you if I see you moaning about nofollow in Digitalpoint again) and a couple of sentences explaining internal linking. The bottomline is that you are not supposed to interlink all your internal pages within each other. Maintain the hierarchy or don’t complain that you don’t get any PageRank on internal pages!

It is a great guide for the newbies. But, I mean, newbies are unlikely to read it. Did they read the Google Webmaster Guidelines? In its current layout, the Webmaster guidelines are available online since early 2006. However, if we take a trip around popular webmaster forums like DigitalPoint or Webmasterworld, we will find the same questions all over again. How do I this and how do I that? When you tell them, they say thank you but still goes out and does their usual B-hat

For me the new SEO guide will be a good check-list. I will read it and make sure I really do everything I should be doing. Well done, Google!