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Last year I bought some domains from someone on DP and unfortunately they were registered at isimtescil.net which is a Turkish registrar. I just asked him to open an account for me and transfer the domains to my account. I logged into my account, changed their name servers and turned all those domains to blogs and added them to my blog network (Allied Network Inc.) and they all gained good Pageranks over the year with a reasonable amount of traffic.

Everything was fine till the time for renewal came. I logged into my account, tried to renew all my domains but it simply didn’t accept my credit card, then I tried to get the authorization code to transfer them to another registrar but got another wiered error. The day after I tried to log in to my account and I found it suspended! Contacted their technical support by submitting a ticket and they replied asking for the copy of my passport, then I replied the same ticket asking “How should I send it to you?” and didn’t get any reply.

The next day when I logged in to their ticketing system, I found my ticket is deleted! Since I had all the ticket information I opened another ticket asking what happend to the ticket number blah blah and guess what! This ticket got removed within 2 hours. Tried it two more times, got no reply and got my ticket removed again and again. So I finally gave up and decided to let the domains expire and catch them when they are released but now I see they have been renewed, parked and showing ads while the registrant, tech and admin info hasn’t been changed on whois database.

Another lesson for me to stick to my trustworthy registrars even if they are a bit more expensive.

I’ll definitely follow up and will keep here updated.

Cheers,

Soroush

It’s a big legal issue and I can’t speak for sure ’cause it’s a big responsibility but I leave the judgment to the readers and wait to hear other similar situations to make sure. After all even if that’s true, I think there’s nothing we can do like all other spammers.

First of all I should say that I had some domains with Registerfly back in the days they were an accredited registrar because of their low prices and promotions. But when ICANN terminated their accreditation, I transferred my domains to other places like most of their other customers.

Anyway today I got 2 emails from them in my Yahoo mail account’s bulk folder, both exactly the same and indicating one of my domains with them is going to expire while after checking that domain I remembered that I’ve already transferred that domain somewhere else and renewed it till 2009. That wasn’t a big deal since that can be a bug in their script which still thinks my domain is registered with them and another bug in their email sender script caused the email to be sent twice BUT looking at my other received spam emails in the bulk folder something smells fishy.

Here is the screenshot:

In fact the server which sent registerfly’s emails AND the one which  sent the other spam emails seem to be the same or at least with the same bug which caused the email to be sent twice!

Just checked the IP addresses the spam emails have been sent from and here are the results:

67.196.144.84
67.196.214.132
67.196.213.186
67.196.22.41
67.196.214.68
70.47.212.173

Both Registerfly emails were sent from 66.135.39.107 so that’s why I can’t speak for sure that they were sent from the same server but considering the situation what you guys think ? Is it just an accident?

Cheers,

Soroush

So as I promised before, I’m gonna disclose the domain name that I won in Namejet’s auction mentioned here and here.

It might not be interesting to many of you but I’ve always had big hopes for a kind of website and this domain is just great for the purpose in my head, specially because it sits beside its sister in my domain collection

The domain name is PhpLance.com which is pretty much clear what it is for but in case you haven’t realized yet, it is going to be a freelance marketplace specialized for php developers which is a huge market.

And the sister’s name is DesignLance.com which is going to be a parallel freelance marketplace mostly for graphic design.

It might seems weird but I’ve done most of the programming work and customization based on wordpress API and hope to release it sometime soon but before that I have some higher priorities such as Allied Network Inc. phase 2 which should be done within next 10 days.

I will keep here updated how the process is going because I know it’s going to be beneficial for a lot of people out there.

Keep in touch,

Soroush

If you’re new, here is the Beginning of the story

And yes! It looks like my assumption was correct!

5 O’clock in the evening and I received an email from Snapnames:

Registration attempts for back-ordered domain names were unsuccessful

Logged in to my account and checked my back-ordered domain list and the domain was still there with out-dated data.

14 minutes later got an email from NameJet with the following subject line:

NameJet Notice - Auction Start

Still haven’t received Pool’s failure email and it is still showing the old data but I will probably receive it soon.

I’m so glad I didn’t rely on Snapnames and Pool.com like most people do and I’m hoping to win the current auction at the end ’cause I’ve been watching this domain for months.

I’ll disclose the name once it’s done

Cheers,

Soroush

From what I’ve heard and what I experienced so far, the best place to back-order on an expiring domain name, depends on the registrar but this time I’m experiencing it closer than ever.

I’ve back-ordered on a domain name, releasing tomorrow, in all 3, Pool.com, Snapnames.com and NameJet.com websites.

The domain is registered at eNom so I think NameJet should have a better chance since eNom Auctions has been moved to NameJet.com but let’s judge after seeing the result.

So here the actual battle starts Pool vs. Snapnames vs. NameJet.

P.S. I’ve never had any success back-ordering on fairly good domains using Godaddy back-order service so I decided not to even mention it, let’s hope they won’t change the history by winning this competition tomorrow.

I will update this post after seeing the result. ( crossed my fingers )

Check the comments and trackbacks…

As many of you know, Overture keyword selector tool located at “inventory.overture.com” without doubt, was one of the most useful tools (if not the most) for webmasters, domainers and SEO and SEM professionals for years, returning a useful and detailed report for free.

I was definitely one of the regular users enjoying this great free tool, but unfortunately it has been a while since Yahoo stopped maintaining it and it was up and down randomly, returning out-dated data. Anyway it has been weeks since I couldn’t even open the page and keep getting timeout error messages.

There has been rumors of Yahoo launching a new improved tool to replace it but a quick research in Yahoo’s official blog and other reliable sources didn’t give me any hope.

Searching Google for “overture keyword tool” gave me the old dead url and the same search in Yahoo gave me nothing but other people’s posts and articles about it. For sure if there was any plan to support it, it would be at the top of Yahoo search results but it isn’t, so I should probably give up and look for an alternative solution.

My quick research for a good alternative solution for keyword suggestion tool had the following result:

Wordtracker keyword suggestion tool seems the most popular one somehow the numbers doesn’t seem equal to overture results but still it’s a great tool to find the best keyword to optimize your site or your campaign for.

While the free tool is useful enough for some basic usages, the paid subscription gives out much more detailed information, saving a lot of manual research time and cost. Besides that they have a free trial so you can experience working with the paid version to see the differences.

The other tool that I’ve found useful is KeywordDiscovery’s free service offered by a company called Trellian.

They also have a paid service and a SEO software which I haven’t tried yet but the description seems useful.

Also there is a comparison page of Wordtracker Vs. KeywordDiscovery (can be found here) and in that KeywordDiscovery seems much more featured than Wordtracker but I can’t judge till I try at least their trial version and compare it to the other one.

I’ll keep here updated,

Cheers,

Soroush

Hi there,

I really need help and suggestions on one of my brilliant domains getting around 120 visitors a month and even earning couple of bucks a month from clicks it gets on sedo parking page. The reason I parked it at sedo wasn’t the rev, it was just because it’s the easiest way to have an idea of the number of visitors.

The domain name is BuildFree(.)com and I know if used properly it can be converted to a self-successful project but for some reason it has been months that I couldn’t think of a unique and good idea to implement on it since I really don’t want to spoil it.

Both .net and .org ones are active and have daily traffic (they are not mine) and since I own .com, I am mostly getting their typo traffic since there are a lot of people like myself trying (.com) by default when they hear of a domain name.

Suggestions are highly appreciated.

Cheers,

Soroush

If you are new to my whole issue with Sedo please read 1)Here & 2)Here then it will be more interesting to continue reading how Sedo treats the domain sellers.

And here is the rest of story…

After passing 4 days of my last email mentioned in the two posts before, and getting no reply I decided to write again asking the status of my email and why they just avoid replying my specific question and a day after I got an email stating “Cancellation of transfer of my domain” !!!

And in that email they simply said the buyer didn’t cooperate and this cancellation is necessary.

That was easy, wasn’t it?

You may not believe how terrible they are when it comes to customer support ! I just don’t get the meaning of GUARANTEED SALE they mentioned in their Faq and I don’t know who is responsible for the 45 days they just wasted my time ?

People may think this was not their fault but I believe it is theirs as they don’t allow direct contact of parties that’s why they have that ridiculous commission on sale. Besides, I don’t care if my domain is not sold, I care about the time they killed by putting me into a kind of “contract and obligation”.

So I want to know what would happen if I (as the seller) sell the domain to someone else while this transfer was in progress ?

If you have ever tried to offer on a domain on Sedo you definitely have noticed that they won’t allow you, till you have a valid credit card on the file so what happened this time ?

It’s funny that one time I received an email they wanted to send to buyer by mistake and here was all they asked:

“…..the transfer will be cancelled and your Sedo account will be put under review.”

WOW that was scary LOL.

Anyway I’m still fighting to get at least a reasonable reply but the overal experience is:

Sedo works only for smooth and easy transactions and all they do is to wait till buyer pays, take their ridiculous commission and pass the rest to seller.

Following up is not even listed in their “to do list” and they just seek for easy money if failed they don’t care how long they have wasted your time, they simply cancel the deal !

Nice headacheless way of making money, isn’t it?

With no hope I will keep here updated.

Cheers,

Soroush

I’ve contacted Sedo again, reminding them of the situation explained here and asked some questions like until when I should wait and blah blah blah.

Guess what ?

I got EXACTLY the same reply that I got a month ago, word by word a template email as a reply that had nothing to do with my questions and in the end something like ‘for further information don’t hesitate to contact us’ !

What is the point of contact when there seems to be an automated reply that I already got it twice !

I don’t know with such a high commission they get, what special do they do ?

Now the question is should I really remain obligated to this sale ?