Domain Owl

New domainers can spend time combining keywords to make new domain names, or they can browse the clearance aisles of the domain world. Drop lists are churning every day, throwing deleting domain names into the shark pool of auctions. The victory belongs to the brave few who can master these drop list scanning chores and pull the gems from the silt.

Drop lists, or deleting name auctions, are composed from various sources. The chief source is the body of renewing names the owners have elected not to renew. These names recur to the domain registrar for ownership and record keeping. The domain owners may not be in the domaining business sector any longer or they may simply be streamlining their domain portfolio. Differing  reasons a name might expire or not be renewed make the excitement of what domain may pop up on the droplist potent for domainers.

Some domainers take the view that only the “dogs” of the domain industry make the droplists. This is not true. The fact is, most domain owners respond to the expiration and renewal notices their various registrars may send. Timely and repeated notifications of domain name renewal are a sign of a conscientious registrar. Godaddy.com, Networksolutions,com, Enom.com and other have a history of reliable “expiration period” pre-droplist domain notification practices.

Yet the domain name of value may yet slip through the the cracks and debut on the drop list to a sea of interested domain name bidders. the challenge for domain main investors is to seed their portfolios with enough anterior names, traffic domains, and lucky finds to increase value in the domain portfolio overall.  Original domain names take longer to seed into the existing SEO vocabulary than established domains with search engine traction.

The domain drop list market is opportunistic and highly competitive. One day a hundred thousand domainers might peruse the domain drop lists and fuel frantic domain name bidding. On a holiday or Sunday many domainers skip the list one domainer might find a fistful of PR treasure and SEO gold for very modest resale amount prices.

Droplisting can save time for the domain name investor because  instead of inventing a new name and taking the associated risk, they can get a known domain name. Instead of guessing via WHOIS domain name data for the entire pantheon of existing and available keyword combination terms and domain names they can simply select to buy or not to bid for existing names.

Many domainers construct cognate domain name clusters within their portfolio as a strategy to capture traffic for a certain subject, hobby, term, or keyword combination. They can resell these names to new project investors or other domainers looking to consolidate an existing position among top terms, keyword base names, and words.

A side benefit of the droplist treasure hunt is that the domain name already has a “presence” within Google and other search engine entities. Bidders can check the rankings themselves using SEO evaluation sites and PR site ranking reports online. Such finds can happen, especially when the drop list techniques for scanning become rote and efficiency rises.

Droplists continue to serve as a way for a domainer to augment an existing portfolio by watching for keywords or terms very similar or cognate to the existing owned domain name the domainer already has. A domain name speculator can vary his “bet about certain technologies or terminologies becoming robustly searched by allotting key resources of investment to the same group of keyword names or related “traffic” urls.

The various email addresses, changed contact numbers, and new addresses can prove a challenge for the registrar to finitely contact the domain owner. This is why WHOIS registry data is so explicitly gathered at the time of the original domain purchase. The administrative and other contacts are used if the registrar feels their customer is somehow not responding. Conscientious registrars guard the domains of their customers.

But if they miss a notice and the renewal period stretches on with no action, the registrar takes control of the “abandoned” name. The registrar may elect to keep the name rolling through their domain name base, or try to vend it for sale in the next chronologically occurring auction. International website owners and domain name brokers can play a part in this process as well.

Shopping the domain name auctions as the names expire and move through the hopper can be fun. Many domainers scrutinize the droplists just to see which trends in domain name buying are being sold off. A bulk selloff tips them off that a name type or lexicon of names is “over”. These maturations of names, especially trendy or “buzzword” names, happen in cycles.

But scanning drop lists, running search scripts, and searching by TLDs and country codes can save time for the busy domainer. Pool.com is one such site, Sedo.com is another.Some domainers specialize in finding keyword names for other domainers. Many registrars feature a droplist augmented service and auction events.

If domainers can identify their niche market or likely keyword dependent domain name for development, they can shrink the cycle of their time spent searching for names of interest online. Tools, scripts,  and droplist sites can save searches to expedite the droplist scan. And they can save their time for domain development, the meat and potatoes of the domain world.