I have a friend who is trying to start up a website of his own. He just told me that someone owned the domain he wanted and that it was just ads and wanted to know if there was anything to do about it. I looked up the domain on whois.net and it turned out to be registered through nameking.com
The suspicous thing is it was just registered a few days ago. I’ve always been afraid of typing in a domain name until I am ready to buy it, and it looks like there is a good reason. Mentioning a possible domain name on the web before purchase is crazy, but it turns out even checking for availability will get you in trouble.
Brad Waller details his dectectve work tracking down the nameking on his blog. Turns out these folks are hunting down searches and buying them up, a process known as domain hijacking. Jerks. Waller says:
My best guess is that these guys have a hook into the whois queries so they can get good ideas for domains. They can register them through their bulk register and then put up ads and do PPC arbitrage while they list them for sale and perhaps use them for bulk email and other schemes.
Presumably you could buy the name from the NameKing but it’s also a pretty safe bet that you’d pay both your arms and half a leg (all are pieces of you which you should try your best to keep).
So be careful and be ready to buy that domain the minute you see it’s possibly. Otherwise you might end up back at the drawing board.
2 Comments
I have the same experiences with the king. I was looking for a domain on domaininfo.com and 2 days later ’somebody’ got the same idea and registered this domain. After about one month this domain was free again and I registered. This is the good part of my story, the bad part is, that I was looking for another domain and boom some hours later this domain was registered by the king again.
Now I know that they track your search results and I am really upset. What can I do? I think it would be the best to wait until they give up this domain again. Does anybody know how often they do so?
That’s interesting, I’ve never heard of a domain being released after a month… but it looks like my friend’s domain is no longer registered with the domain king as well. That’s an interesting twist