Domain Owl

Active domainers are watching the auction sales and seeing massive big ticket name sales this week and thinking about putting their Internet names on the block. But the best value estimator data for domain name sales comes from traffic and backlinks and pings from other websites of equal or greater page rank. Assuming a website is of low page rank or remains somewhat undeveloped, any linking activity will benefit the name value.

See the previous post regarding the top websites online in terms of web visitor traffic. These sites, each one of them, is a SEO weapon you can use to promote any website or domain name link. Most of them are open account and free use sites. That’s a free ad on websites of top page rank at which you can put links of your choice on. This list of top websites should be a shopping list of places to cement web links to your targeted domain.

When a domainer with SEO goals reviews the traffic referrers for a specific domain name, they should check through this list for that domain name. Any of these high volume urls that do not appear in the web traffic list go to the top of the to-do list for that domain name. Hand picked url planting works infinitely better than mechanized backlinking because the traffic is organic and naturally occurring. Yet so few domainers actually do it.

Why post your link on these popular websites? A host of good reasons. Those monster traffic websites will channel bots and visitors to your sites and hike your page rank along with the millions of dollars they spend ramping up their own. If you place an ad write a review or list an item with a proper link back to your store, that’s a promotional that can only help your site. These actions are often only briefly screened or scanned before publication.

No domainer should list a domain name at a drop list, online auction or bidding d threawithout consulting some of these sites. No domainer who claims an aggressive approach to value building can afford to skip this step in domain marketing. Even targeting five of these websites and systematically incorporating their website url over a period of three to six months will show tangible page rank improvement.

Buyers that domainers want to bid on their names will do this review. They will wonder why an aggressive price is asked from a domainer who clearly hasn’t attempted the sale marketing efforts they themselves would use. Right the most savvy of domainers are using serious strategies to target end users for traffic, product sales and site name value increase for domain resale.

Time to review your domain name strategy. Per domain name, check through this list, using a graph chart or Excel spreadsheet. There should be a pattern of websites represented by the websites used for promotion. This report should be used as a visual reminder to market websites. The density of scatter dots on a list of domain names and the cross listed pivot list of popular websites should tell their own story regarding the domainers’ real efforts toward domain name promoter.

Some webmasters might look at this list of domains as a lot of work. It is, and so is domaining. But for the professional domain name investor willing to properly put the time in, page rank and traffic can increase. The statistics of this increase in SEO value will be available for any potential buyer to review through various analytics or domain value estimators.  And then domainers can cultivate buyers using qualified data that gives new buyers inspiration to bid, with greater success and enhanced networking response.

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For domainers looking to pick up a few great domain deals here is a typical analysis of the Pool hotlist and the drop evaluation technique. The Pool list is published via email from Pool.com daily in anticipation of recipient interest in bidding on names at the Pool.com domain name auctions held daily online. These names drop or are put up for sale by domainer sellers daily.

Deletion lists can be addicting because they show what other domainers have been up to. Drop lists show what domain names other domainers have decided are either not worth their while to renew, or what domains they have not gotten around to renewing. As many a domain name fish story will start, the “renewal email got lost in the shuffle’ incidence can happen very easily indeed.

Unless a domainer already has a site invested for a given trademark, trademark names are best avoided. One reason they are in the drop to begin with is that the owner has either gotten a “Cease and Desist” letter from the copyright owner or fears one will arrive with any further development of the name. Trademark names are a risk. The domain Amazondiscounts.net is an example of a possible trademark name.

Short names are always good to review because they may come very close to names you already own or may be acronyms for longer names you already own. This begets “type-in” traffic domainers want. A name in tomorrow’s Pool list, like r0b.net, could be good for domain name owners and administrators named Rob or those with burglary aspirations, or those with acronyms totaling R-O-B.

A name for sale like cashmonk.com might be a very good site name for an affiliate or cash raising site or a website with strategems for building multi level marketing or popup revenues online. Keywords like “cash” and “money” can be competitive bidding arenas, so domainers should have their checkbooks ready for active bidding. Money words are genuine traffic attractors because so many people are looking for information about money markets, investing, budgets and so forth online all the time.

Hyphenates are an acquired taste. Some domainers stem from the “old school” of domaining where almost any hyphenate was a detractor for original name value. Symbols were estimated as harder for web users to remember, type in, or use. Hyphenates always stand the risk of building type-in traffic for the name owner of the same domain name without the hyphen.

A name like debt-elimination.com has “money” name appeal but a hyphenate detractor element to it. A domain name for sale at Pool.com like rugged-notebooks has a tech designation but a hyphenate detractor dynamic as well. Likely buyers for this name should be those with other names with “notebook” in them for traffic continuation or site keyword mirroring and linking.

A deleting name like foreclosedlists.com reflects conflicting factors within a qualified domain name up for auction. This is a real estate name, and a partial money name, but also a list name, and can be considered too long by some purist domain name investors. But the likelihood of searches for this type of site might be estimated to be high enough to realize value and profit for affiliate and traffic visits.

Prohomes.com follows much of the same logic, except it can be argued to more valuable because it is much shorter to type in than foreclosedlists.com. The homes market for domain names may also be seen as a longer term viable keyword investment than the “foreclosure” arena of recent financially related real estate activity. Prohomes.com could be an excellent long term domain “flipping” investment waiting for the right corporate buyer.

Foodcult.com and fakeplants.com make amusing ideas for websites if the bidding price can be kept within the probable window of return on domain investment. The domainer should have an idea what assembling a directory and a number of articles should cost and a link building strategy for the site.

Further on down the list, On99.com might make a good site if the number 99 has some relevance to another data item or price level, such as 99 cents or 99 dollars. Numerical domains can be tricky, but a good example of a site is gymnastics2010.com, which has up to the minute gymnastics articles for this current year. Date domains can be worthwhile to acquire and develop in their current “date year”.

Download the full Pool.com list is available at the pool website, and searching out special domain names or names not featured on the list is a domainer’s stock in trade. Expect higher bidding for short names, and money names, and manage bids so cascading auctions don’t rob the domainer of time to rebid. Finally, resist the urge to get in a bidding war or rally to a name that builds interest simply as an auction win to acquire.

Safe and happy drop listing, everyone!

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Skimming the drop lists is one of the first ways a newb domainer can teach themselves the ropes. Drop lists are available for free and can be perused using whatever script or program seeking search the domainer can devise. Drop lists and deletions lists come from expiring domains whose owners have elected not to renew them.

Drop names also come from registrars who have elected not to retain the names any longer. Registrars have the right to retain the name for new registration after it has passed its last pending renewal period. But some registrars may not want to include the name in its database. The load on the servers may already be too taxing. Or the registrar may simply only want to support paid active registered names.

The domainers’  task is to ferret out which marketable names occur on the drop list and which they might bid on and get at a reasonable price. Some names may seem like they would be very competitive, but for that day the other bidders might be overcommitted or doing something else. Marking out which names you want to bid on and which values you want to assign your highest big sharpens the domaining instinct.

The competitive bidding inside the drop lists day by day is a sport of domainer kings. Keeping abreast of the list for chosen keywords or subject names or even niche terms can pay off with great picks. but the raw data can be too much for some domainers to handle daily. So the drop lists can be downloaded in five day advances for the next five rolling days of drop name auctions.

Many domainers specialize in drop scanning and bird dogging for bargain names in the deletions bin. They develop customers who want certain niche names like typos or sports names, adult names or short names. These domain name buyers create another layer in the domain name game.

User names in auctions become familiar, especially among drop list customers. A history of other bidders can also be seen in some cases. That way domainers know what kind of heavy hitters they are bidding against. Or they can assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of another domainer bidder and decide on their bidding strategy for a certain domain name based on those things.

Identifying keyword terms to your choice is a good idea before scanning the drop lists. Choosing certain names or words that you want to build up into a concentration inside your domain name portfolio can also make this task easier. If domainers are not careful, they will go on bidding and buying sprees for domain names without consolidating a strategic market plan first.

Continuing deletion auctions show names which have been auctioned up into a froth of new bidding wars from their “deceased” status. Often a domain owner will put their domain name into the drop lists to see which avid offers they can get. Or they simply have too many names to handle at present. One domainer’s drop can be another domainer’s mountain of gold.

Expiring names can also be accidental “drops” from the owners who are too busy to scan their expiration emails. They can also be packs of domain names very similar to each other being jettisoned in groups by weary former owners. Knowing what you are looking for in advance, or setting a ceiling on auction bids will save time and resources when bidding on drop list auctions.

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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.

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