Archive for the ‘Domain Names’ Category
Introducing Drop.com.au - Domain Catch Specialists
A new and exciting internet brand has launched today in Australia. drop.com.au is a new domain business by Dark Blue Sea (most commonly known for their Fabulous.com and FabulousDomains.com brands) and is set to shake up the Australian Domain Industry with it’s domain catch platform.
This exciting new brand offers a domain catching service, allowing participants to re-register expired domain names the instant they are deleted and purged from the registry.
The service runs on technology previously used by the successful registrar Domain8, to catch deleted .au Domain Names, and operates on week-days when the registry releases the expired domains and makes them available for registration.
Catching is the process of re-registering a domain after it deleted and made available again for registration. The drop.com.au system monitors the registry for the randomised purge, and continuously attempts to register the name until it has been caught. The registration process is completed literally within milliseconds of becoming available.
Interested parties are required to bid on the name they would like to register on the morning of the day when the “drops” occurs (a “drop” is the process of a domain name being deleted & purged from the registry) and as in all auctions, the highest bidder at auction close wins the “right to catch”.
Over the past 6 months, drop-catch services such as this have yielded some very valuable domain assets including printing.com.au (which was picked up for a meager $A 9221.00) and many other high value domain names going for as low as a single dollar (plus registration costs).
The drop.com.au service does not guarantee 100% success, but sources at DBS indicate that drop.com.au should perform with 85% success-rate and higher, which is a good result considering other players have also been taking part, officially or otherwise, for the past 2 years or so.
In addition to the Drop-Catch platform, drop.com.au also plans to introduce many new services aimed at the domain investment market. Hopefully a new after-market service is one of these services, because it is certainly lacking in the industry. Aftermarket services for the uninitiated, allow people to buy and sell .AU domains.
Domain trading is a relatively new concept in Australia, with the regulator of .AU domain names only laxing it’s policy on transfers between registrants (the ability to trade a name) in June 2008. There are only a few players in this space, including the rather expensive NetFleet.
Given FabulousDomains.com’s experience in the International Domain Space with it’s Domain Distribution Network (listing over 600,000 international domains for trade), it is a certainty that Dark Blue Sea is capable of providing a superior offering in the Australian Domain After-Market, and Search News will be watching in anticipation of their growth and success, and many of the other innovative tools they promise to bring to the domain name industry.
Visit the newly launched website today: www.drop.com.au
ICANN Conference in Sydney
Sydney will play host to the ICANN Conference this June, and enrollment is now open to Domain Registrars, Service Providers, and the community at large.
ICANN is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and whilst ICANN has little to do with Internet Marketing and Search Engines, they play the single most responsible role on the Internet, by managing the policies pertaining to the domain name system, as well as IP Addressing.
ICANN Conferences are a great networking opportunity for those in the industry, and a great way to learn about new developments to policy and emerging technologies.
Many of the key topics at this years conference in Sydney will include the new TLDs, IPSec, IPv6 and DNS Fast Fluxing (a high-tech method of updating nameservers every few seconds to avoid detection and being shut down - this is commonly used by phishers and spammers).
This year’s ICANN conference is open for enrollment and runs from June 21st - 26th June 2009 in Sydney.
For information and details on how to enrol, visit syd.icann.org
Will New ICANN TLDs change search engines?
The following is the transcript of a response we made earlier on the Linked In group “Domain Name“. This is a non-public forum, but thought the topic was related to Search Engines, and thus worthy of publishing on Search News.
Peter Leuzinger of Net Names had asked:
“Will the gTLD liberalization by ICANN upcoming this or next year change the way search engines operates?”
Our response:
I think the search engines are already influenced by the TLDs currently in the space, and feel that this will continue to be the case, as long as the TLD is topic-specific, or region specific.
Example: The CCTLDs such as .AU and .CA are synonymous with Australia and Canada, and this is part of the localised search results presented in the search engines (for example, in google.com.au selecting the “Pages from Australia” option will display local results for Australian pages, the most common being .COM.AU websites).
.MOBI is the space for mobile phones, although I’m not sure this has been as successful as some would hope, with many companies using sub-domains, such as m.facebook.com for example.
.TEL is an interesting space to watch, and it seems Telnic have kept search engines in mind when developing the service, and also use it as part of their marketing strategy.
The .TEL service runs completely on the DNS protocol, and is attractive for the search engines to crawl and index this information due to the information being quick and relatively simple to parse.
.TEL is an online phone-book or contact system if you like, and .TEL has potential to work it’s way into the search engines as a contact information store, but with it’s ability to list keywords related to your business or service, may also be beneficial as part of a businesses SEO Strategy.
I would expect Google at the very least to implement some form of indexing and using a new TLD in an appropriate manner, as Google have gone so far as to index books, NNTP newsgroups and much more. If Google’s use of that TLD is significant, I’d expect the other players to follow.
In terms of new TLDs being launched in the coming years influencing the search engines, this really depends on a number of factors.
Firstly, I think that new TLDs can be very topic specific.
Example:
In Australia, Churches often use . ORG.AU names, because their legal status in the Country is a non-profit organisation, and the policy rules permit them to use . ORG.AU or . ASN.AU names, whereas .CHURCH or similar could symbolize much more, and the search engines would be able to then use .CHURCH names in indexing Churches in SERPS.
Possibly not the best example to follow a religious institution, however .XXX could be a well regulated space for adult-oriented content, and search engines already have the ’safe search’ function enabled by default, and could add additional layers of restriction and/or verification to ensure Adult content isn’t found by minors.
The possibilities are endless, but I feel quite strongly on a few points when I consider the introduction of new TLDs:
1. The new TLD should pose a benefit to the community at large.
2. The registry should have a good marketing campaign to educate the community at large about it’s existence and purpose (example: how many .MOBI or .ASIA domains have you seen advertised in print-media or online?). The registry should also work in conjunction with the search engines to promote the benefits of their TLD and why they should alter the way their search engine presents information to their users.
3. ICANN should not allow the introduction of new TLDs to pollute the internet.
If those three considerations above aren’t adhered to, then there is little point in launching a new TLD in the first place, as it will present little benefit, and we’ll see an increase in confusion amongst internet users.
New Domain name: Dot Tel
DotTel ( .TEL ) is a new type of domain name that promises a new way of locating information on the web. It may also include benefits to compliment your existing SEO Strategy.
Search news contacted the Dot Tel registry recently for some information about the new TLD, to see what all the hype was about, and the benefits it has to offer for a company’s Search Engine Optimisation Strategy.
DotTel is a different concept from most other ordinary domains such as .COM or .COM.AU, because rather than using the domain for ‘regular purposes’ such as hosting a traditional web-page that presents your company or product information using a HTTP web server, Dot Tel is a ‘directory service‘ of sorts, which presents a company or person’s contact information, and that content is serverd over the ‘DNS’ or Domain Name Service protocol.
DNS is s the underlying technology that runs the domain name system, in essence, allowing you to type a web address into your web browser, and it locates where on the web you need to go to retrieve that information or website.
A spokesperson for .TEL said the new domain has very specific and unique content, which allows customers to locate your business and provide information on the products or service you provide, in addition to your contact information and location. You are also allowed to to specify keywords related to your business, so this has the added benefit of being crawled and indexed by local search engines.
Making use of DNS technology presents many incentives for search engines such as Google to crawl and index the information because it is in a standard and easy to read format, and updates to content are almost instant, search engines have more incentive to re-index .TEL content in short intervals.
Finally, the spokeperson feels .TEL adds a great deal of value to the end customer because .TEL content is easy to maintain, can be updated at short intervals and has the best return on investment in the SEO business because it is expected to retail at very low prices (approx $15-20 USD/year).
When asked about privacy concerns, DotTel has advised that just like many social networking sites such as Facebook, customers can decide on what information is made public and who gets to sees information that they would prefer not to be seen by the public. In a similar way that you can see the friends of your contacts in Facebook, DotTel will also allow you to see a limited amount of information to people in your approved contacts network.
The Dot Tel landrush is currently on (Jan 09 to February) and landrush applications start on Feb 3rd at a premium price, and general availability (GoLive) begins on 24th March.
Visit the Telnic website for more information on this new and exciting Domain TLD, and view their demos for demonstrations of the many features and benefits offered by DotTel.
We’d like to thank DotTel for supplying this information.
Article brought to you by Search King.