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Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

My advice to you is if you find a domain name that you like and it’s available, register it immediately. Here’s what happened to me recently. I was brainstorming about a new business idea and I wanted to find a good domain name for it. After a number of searches, I finally found a name that I liked and it was available. Sometimes I like to put things in the backburner of my mind to let it sit there for a couple of days. So I ended up not registering the name and left it at that. That was around July 1st.

Now when I went to check for the domain name again on July 5th, I found that it had been registered on July 2nd. Could that be just pure coincidence that someone else thought of the domain name the same day or just a day after I was searching for it? This smells fishy. I remembered reading something that Bob Parson’s wrote about domain kiting.

Here’s an excerpt of the definition of domain kiting or domain tasting from Wikipedia:

.[It is] a practice of registrants using the five-day “grace period” at the beginning of a domain registration for ICANN-regulated generic top-level domains to test the marketability of a domain name. During this period, when a registration must be fully refunded by the domain registry, a cost-benefit analysis is conducted by the registrant on the viability of deriving income from advertisements being placed on the domain’s web site.

So what happens is that a company grabs the domain name for up to 5 days to check out the popularity of the domain or to “taste” it. My guess is that they put up paid search ads and run an arbitrage campaign to those domains and see if they are profitable.

According to Bob Parsons:

The practice of domain tasting and kiting continues to rage out-of-control. In February 2007, 55.1 million domain names were registered. Of those, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept. With the exception of just a few names, 93.5% of those names were registered simply to see how much advertising revenue – paid by big search firms like our “do no evil� friends at Google – will generate when they are associated with a one page Web site and related links.

Back to my case, I checked out to see who registered the domain and found that it was a company called MetaPredict. Actually it’s UltraRPM doing business as MetaPredict. Someone else had a similar experience here. The company has over 360,000 domains registered under them. The question really boils down to who did they know about this domain name that I searched for? Do they have access to GoDaddy’s log of names that are searched on a daily basis?

So, if I was really the victim of domain kiting the domain that I wanted to register should be available today which is the 6th day since it was registered, right? I checked it again and sure enough, it is available once again so I promptly grabbed it.

Technorati Tags: domain kiting, domain tasting

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