The problem is that the current hosting company controls the DNS. We have to give them a one day notice to make the change. Instead of going live Friday night, we have to wait until Monday.

The moral of the story is that if you own your own domain name, you need to understand the technical issues involved and you need to know enough that you have control of it.

Maybe you don’t like keys and you’re not a locksmith, but you have a key to the front door of your house, right? Maybe you’re not a mechanic, but you like to drive your car, don’t you?

King of My Castle, Master Of My Domain Name

Here’s an overview of how it all works, in simple language.

A web server is just a computer that responds to requests for web pages.

It can also be referred to as a “web host”. You rent space on a web hosting company’s servers to put your web site on.

Each web server/computer has an IP address. That’s a technical number that uniquely identifies it among all the computers in the universe.

Every computer on the Internet has an IP address assigned to it. You may not know this, but your computer has an IP address associated with it.

IP addresses are the actual way that computers, servers, talk to each other on the Internet. It is the language of the Internet for computers.

Problem is that humans don’t remember those IP addresses very easily. We developed domain names to be easier for people to read and remember.

Domain names are just a convenience for people.

The next problem is tying the domain name to the IP address. We need something like a phone book. I know I want Joe’s Pizza, but what is their phone number?

Let’s look it up in the phone book. If the phone book says it’s 555-1234, then everyone calls 555-1234. If Joe’s Pizza were to move and get a new phone number, then the phone book would have to change to reflect that, right? If they change the phone book so it says that it’s 555-5678, then everyone calls 555-5678.

That’s easy, right?

Well, the system that manages these pointers or associations with domain names and IP addresses is called a DNS, domain name server. The “name server” is actually a computer, a server, that will tell you what IP address is associated with what domain name. You can ask it where is “www.walton.com” and it will tell you it’s at “76.246.231.1″, which happens to be the IP address of my web server/computer.

It’s just like a phone book for web sites.

How DNS Works

From all of this, you see the whoever owns the DNS, owns the world, or at least your web site. It’s all about control.

Log into where you registered your domain name and see if there is a place to make changes to the DNS. If you have a hosting company manage it for you, see if there’s a place in the admin pages to make changes.

You don’t have to know all the details about how to do it, but you should have access to it.

I’m a nice guy and I’ve registered domain names for clients in my own name just to save them the technical difficulties. They just wanted to pay me and have it done with. That’s fine. I’ll do everything I can for my clients.

I’ve heard of other people having trouble with having access and control.

I know it’s a convenience/knowledge vs access/control issue. I know you just don’t want to deal with it. But you should at least know how to do it.

The more you rely on other people, the less control you have.

You should at least be able to log in and make changes yourself if you want to.

If you can’t do that, then you don’t have control of your domain name or your web site.

Etsy published the “Etsy Guide to SEO”.

SEO is generally divided into “on site” factors and “off site” factors. In their book, they detail the things that you can do to your Etsy shop and products pages, all of them “on site”.

What they don’t tell you about are the “off site” techniques. “Off site” is everything that is not on your site. It generally refers to building links from other sites to your site, which is the biggest factor in SEO.

They only devote one page to link building ideas and only one paragraph to any task that is not on the Etsy site. They want to keep all of your attention focused on their Etsy site and not necessarily the absolute best ways to get traffic.

Let’s gaze off into the distance and see if we can build some inbound links another way, without anything to do with Etsy.

Before you do anything else, you need to define your keywords. I’ve written a few posts about that and cover it in the SEO book.

• Before You Do ANYTHING Else…
• Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry- Keywords and Competition
• Sell Handmade Stuff On The Internet – SEO, Part One

When you have your keywords picked, we’re going to create a new website, for FREE, and build a bunch of links ourselves. It’s way easier than you think. Really. Watch closely.

Pick your top 3 keywords.

You’re going to create a new web site for FREE. It will have some limitations, so you can’t do everything that you might want to do, but it will do enough to make this technique work and it’s free.

Go to http://www.wordpress.com and follow their instructions, using the top three keywords as your user ID. If your keywords are “handmade glass jewelry”, then create the site as “handmadeglassjewelry”.

That will give you a site with a domain name of “handmadeglassjewelry.wordpress.com”. You get SEO value for having the keywords in the domain name, even if it’s got the “wordpress.com” in there too.

They have some instructions there about how to create posts and pages, so when you figure out how to write a new post, write a new post about one of your products. Use all of the keywords that you can think of when describing it. Put in a photo. Write naturally, like you were writing so that I could read it. I have some WordPress Tutorial Videos that might be helpful.

Put in a link to your product page on Etsy. In the “edit” page, put in the name of your product and select that text. There’s a “link” button at the top. Click that. Copy and paste in the URL to your product page. Insert that into the copy on the page. You’ve just created a link to your product page.

Write a new post for every one of your products. Write naturally, but use your keywords. Put a link, or maybe two, from each post to each product page.

When you are done, you’ll have a web site, with your main keywords in the domain name, and links to every one of your product pages.

As you publish new products on Etsy, write a new post for each one on your web site. As your products sell, leave the posts and links. The search traffic will build up over time.

If you start to love this stuff, write other posts about the subject of your products, and not your products specifically. Your site will get some SEO just from the related content. Your site gives your Etsy shop a bunch of SEO.

As your SEO rankings start to build and you start see some results, consider creating your very own site that you fully control, instead of the wordpress.com free version. You’ll be able to do more things with it and you will have complete control over it.

**cough** I can build one for you… **cough**.

The more pages you have on a site, the more links you have, and the more links you can point at your Etsy shop, and the more search traffic you’ll get from the search engines.

There are many other SEO things that you can do, but this is free, easy, and effective. Call it the “low hanging fruit”.

Feel the power.

I’d like to explain how it works.

The basic steps are:

1. Find out who is beating you in the search engines now.
2. Find out who is linking to those sites.
3. Find out how to get those same links to your own site.

Step One
I’m going to assume that you know what your keywords are. You can repeat this step for each of your keywords if you have multiples, but I’ll describe the process for only one keyword in this article.

Do a search for your keyword. Note the top 10 results. Write down (or copy and paste) each URL in the top 10 results. These are your competitors that you will try to beat.

Step Two
Go to Yahoo’s Site Explorer at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/. You don’t have to log in unless you are working on your own sites. Up at the top of the page, there’s an input field with a button to “Explore URL”. Don’t put it in the “My Sites” input.

You have a list of 10 URLs from step one. Put in the first URL and hit the “Explore URL” button. This will return a list of all of the pages of the site you are exploring.

Remember that this is just what Yahoo has in it’s index and may or may not be accurate. It seems to be more accurate than the information that Google gives you, but it’s not perfect. It is not absolute truth, only a reasonable facsimile.

The first response is a list of all of the pages that exist on the site you are exploring. Keep in mind that this is according to Yahoo, not absolute truth.

Click on the button to the right of pages that says “inlinks”. This will display all links, from all places, to only the URL you are exploring.

I prefer to limit the number of links displayed to “Except from this domain”. That will not show you any links from any page at the domain name of the site you are exploring.

There’s some nuance here because technically, “www.walton.com” is a different site than “shops.walton.com”. Same domain name, but different sites. I really want to know how well the entire domain is doing, so I don’t care about what subdomain, (that’s the “www” vs. “shops” in my example) that links are pointing at. I want to exclude them all. I only want to see links from other people’s sites, not links from the site I’m exploring.

I also want to know how many links go to the “Entire Site”. There may be links to specific pages or blog posts or special pages. Most links go to the home page, but not all. I want to see all links to any page on this entire site.

You should have changed the first drop down menu to “Except from this domain” and the second drop down to “Entire site.” When you make those changes, it should refresh and display according to the new settings.

This will give you a list of up to 1,000 places that link to the site at the URL you put in.

Step Three
Look at them. Ponder them. Click through to the next page and the next page. Click on some of the links.

This is the hard part. You’ll have to be part Sherlock Holmes to figure this out. Your goal is to figure out who is linking to this site and then find out how you can get them to link to you to.

Some questions you might ask while reviewing this list are:

• Are there a lot of links from the same site?
• Are the sites that link here related to the same keyword?
• Are there links from sites that obviously have nothing to do with the keyword?
• Are there any blogs that you can leave comments on?
• Are their any forums that you can leave comments on?
• Is the owner of this site (your competition) leaving comments on other’s sites?
• Are there links from directories or places that you can formally request links from?
• Are their links from article sites?
• Are there links that you can easily reproduce?

If you see a bunch of links from comments on other sites, then you know that you have to target those sites for your own comments.

If there are directories, you need to ask to be added to those directories too.

If there are links from article sites, then you need to write some articles.

A good, healthy set of links should be from random sites that are related to the keyword, but are just genuinely honest links because the other person liked what this site had to say.

If you write good content and people read it, they will link to your site too. Leave a comment on their site and build a relationship with them. They’ll check out your site and probably link to it.

If you are doing the social media thing, people should be twittering and facebooking your content. If this site is doing that, has great content and is social, then you’re even, because you have great content and you’re social too, right?

If that’s the case, get to know the sites that are linking to your competitors. Leave comments and get to know the people behind those sites. Reach out, be nice, be helpful, and get to know people, specifically the people that are linking to your competitors.

The Balance
The balance that you have to strike here is between being completely nice and goodhearted, innocently out to help make the world be a better place, and on the other hand, being a money grubbing, greedy pig.

You need to help make the world be a better place. I’m going to assume that when you sell your product to someone that makes the world a better place, or why are you selling it?

Leading with the kind heart and the helpful hand, you need to keep in the back of your mind the target of your competition. Yes, you should be nice, but you should also target those specific people that are helping your competition.

Rinse. Repeat.
Once you review the lists of links for each of the 10 URLs for this keyword, you should spend time, (every day!), working on getting links from each of those places. You have up to a thousand URLs for each of 10 keywords, so you have ten thousand places to get links from.

Start at the top and work your way down. When you get to the bottom, repeat.

Do that until you have so many quality links that your site is listed above your competition in the search engine results pages. Build the links, then build more links.

By that time, the world will be a much better place, because they’ve been buying your products instead of your competition’s, and you will have more money to increase your business even more.

What could be better than that?

If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Thanks!

On-Page (Keyword-Specific) Ranking Factors

1. Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag
66% very high importance
8% moderate consensus

2. Keyword Use as the First Word(s) of the Title Tag
63% high importance
11.3% light consensus

3. Keyword Use in the Root Domain Name (e.g. keyword.com)
60% high importance
11.2% light consensus

4. Keyword Use Anywhere in the H1 Headline Tag
49% moderate importance
10.2% light consensus

5. Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page
47% moderate importance
13% moderate contention

One tip to take away from this is when you are using WordPress and the “All in one SEO” plug in, the default for all of the titles is: “%blog_title% | %post_title%”. Change that to “%post_title% | %blog_title%” to get those keywords closer to the beginning of the title.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#on-page-keyword-specific-ranking-factors

The web site is the truck of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

After you get your keywords, before all that other stuff I wrote about for SEO, you need to get a domain name and build yourself a web site. This is not a definitive post on how to do this, but more of an overview of the process.

Here’s what I wrote:

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/2010/02/14/sell-handmade-stuff-on-the-internet-seo-part-one.html

The web site is the trunk of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

Don’t use dashes. I’m not sure why, but no one likes them and Google will give you points off for them. I guess that spammers liked using them and they got a bad reputation.

There’s a link in my right sidebar that will take you to a page that will allow you to check if a domain name is available or not.

Domain Name Look Up

The steps to building a web site are:

1. Register a domain name.
I suggest GoDaddy for domain name registration. (NOT for web hosting!) Check on to make sure the domain name you want is available at the page above, then go here to register it. You have to point the domain name at the web host server to make it all work. Again, the details of how to do this are beyond the scope of this article.

2. Rent some web hosting space.
This is the subject of much debate, but I like PowWeb. There are many web hosts out there and they have pretty much become a commodity. I also host sites and if you want us to host your site, we have better customer support than the big guys.

3. Install your web site.

Under that number 3, I’m going to tell you that using WordPress is the absolute best way to build a web site today. I’ve been building them since 1994, for large companies and small. Today, I only use WordPress.

Steps to using WordPress:

1. Install WordPress.
Usually the web host has an option to do this for you with a click of a button. There are many “how to” guides out there for this. If you read this post and ask me to do it for you, I’ll do it for free. No strings. Just mention the secret word “penguins” in your email. (My personal addiction.)

2. Pick a “Theme”.
There are a bunch of free themes and some “premium” themes that cost money. If you want a custom theme, I can build you one. This topic has more depth to it than I can address here, but pick a theme and install it.

3. Write pages.
Create the static pages that you want on your web site. These will be the normal “contact us”, “about us”, and other stuff that stays the same.

4. Write posts.
You need to blog. Yes, you do. I’ll talk more about what to say and why later, but for now, make sure this is set up.

That is a quick overview of how to set up a web site. I have 15 years of experience to pour out into a long, rambling post about the details of each step, but I’ll save that for another day. Today, you should just know that this is the overview of steps you need to take.

The most important, and first, thing for you to do is to figure out a strategy for SEO, search engine optimization. Going through the exercise will get you thinking about your site and how it fits into your overall business model.

What is the goal of your site? I asked that of a potential new client last week and it stopped him. He didn’t really know and said he’d have to think about it. I assume that the goal of your site is to sell stuff. That means that people have to find it through search engines. It might be to only add credibility when you talk to people in other sales venues. It might be to make yourself feel good about yourself because you have a place to tell the world whatever it is in your head.

If you want to sell stuff, who will you sell it to? What will they be searching for when they find you? What are you selling? Exactly? How specific is your product?

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

It's a balancing act.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Put in a keyword that makes sense for your site. Take a guess, if nothing else. Do a search for related keywords. You can sort the results by clicking on the column headers. We want to see how many searches for a keyword there are, on average, for a month.

Look at the “additional keywords to consider” at the bottom of the page. Look at the number of searches for these. Are there any that are relevant? Feel free to slice and dice these results, adding keywords to search for and sorting on the results, until you get a feel for what the best keyword(s) are for your site.

Make a list of the top 5 to 10 keywords. You’ll know which ones seem to mean the most in your niche. Write down the number of monthly searches for each one.

We want to compare the number of searches for each keyword, per month, with the number of competitors out there with web sites for those searches. Do a normal Google search for each of your top 5-10 keywords. Look at the number of total pages out there that use that phrase. At the top of the page, it will say, to the right, “Results 1-10 of about NNNNNNNN”. Write down that number of other pages next to that keyword.

You now have a list of keywords, the number of searches per month and the number of other pages that contain that keyword. If anything jumps out at you, you might have a good idea which keywords to target. If nothing jumps out, do the math. Divide the number of pages by the number of searches. This gives you a ratio. Compare the ratios. Pick the top 3-5 keywords that you think you have the best chance of beating, that is, the most searches compared to the least number of pages for that search.

Does that make sense? You’re trying to find out what keywords you want to try to rank for. Everything else we do for SEO depends on picking these keywords well. You can always readjust later, but pick good ones to start with.

Now that you have your list of keywords, we’ll move on to what to do with them in the next part.

The web site is the truck of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

After you get your keywords, before all that other stuff I wrote about for SEO, you need to get a domain name and build yourself a web site. This is not a definitive post on how to do this, but more of an overview of the process.

Here’s what I wrote:

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/2009/08/07/how-to-make-stuff-at-home-and-sell-it-on-the-internet-seo-part-one.html

The web site is the truck of the tree, the thing that holds it all together, the thing that you hang everything else on, the things that everything else grows out of. Which metaphor do you like the best there?

Don’t use dashes. I’m not sure why, but no one likes them and Google will give you points off for them. I guess that spammers liked using them and they got a bad reputation.

There’s a link in my right sidebar that will take you to a page that will allow you to check if a domain name is available or not.

Domain Name Look Up

The steps to building a web site are:

1. Register a domain name.
I suggest GoDaddy for domain name registration. (NOT for web hosting!) Check on to make sure the domain name you want is available at the page above, then go here to register it. You have to point the domain name at the web host server to make it all work. Again, the details of how to do this are beyond the scope of this article.

2. Rent some web hosting space.
This is the subject of much debate, but I like PowWeb. There are many web hosts out there and they have pretty much become a commodity. I also host sites and if you want us to host your site, we have better customer support than the big guys.

3. Install your web site.

Under that number 3, I’m going to tell you that using WordPress is the absolute best way to build a web site today. I’ve been building them since 1994, for large companies and small. Today, I only use WordPress.

Steps to using WordPress:

1. Install WordPress.
Usually the web host has an option to do this for you with a click of a button. There are many “how to” guides out there for this. If you read this post and ask me to do it for you, I’ll do it for free. No strings. Just mention the secret word “penguins” in your email. (My personal addiction.)

2. Pick a “Theme”.
There are a bunch of free themes and some “premium” themes that cost money. If you want a custom theme, I can build you one. This topic has more depth to it than I can address here, but pick a theme and install it.

3. Write pages.
Create the static pages that you want on your web site. These will be the normal “contact us”, “about us”, and other stuff that stays the same.

4. Write posts.
You need to blog. Yes, you do. I’ll talk more about what to say and why later, but for now, make sure this is set up.

That is a quick overview of how to set up a web site. I have 15 years of experience to pour out into a long, rambling post about the details of each step, but I’ll save that for another day. Today, you should just know that this is the overview of steps you need to take.

The most important, and first, thing for you to do is to figure out a strategy for SEO, search engine optimization. Going through the exercise will get you thinking about your site and how it fits into your overall business model.

What is the goal of your site? I asked that of a potential new client last week and it stopped him. He didn’t really know and said he’d have to think about it. I assume that the goal of your site is to sell stuff. That means that people have to find it through search engines. It might be to only add credibility when you talk to people in other sales venues. It might be to make yourself feel good about yourself because you have a place to tell the world whatever it is in your head.

If you want to sell stuff, who will you sell it to? What will they be searching for when they find you? What are you selling? Exactly? How specific is your product?

This will all boil down to “keywords”. You need to decide what keywords you want to be found for. The more general the keyword, the more results will match it, which means more competition for that keyword. You want to be as specific as you possibly can, to narrow the results enough that you can beat your competition, but wide enough that you can actually get some traffic. It’s a balancing act.

It's a balancing act.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool

Put in a keyword that makes sense for your site. Take a guess, if nothing else. Do a search for related keywords. You can sort the results by clicking on the column headers. We want to see how many searches for a keyword there are, on average, for a month.

Look at the “additional keywords to consider” at the bottom of the page. Look at the number of searches for these. Are there any that are relevant? Feel free to slice and dice these results, adding keywords to search for and sorting on the results, until you get a feel for what the best keyword(s) are for your site.

Make a list of the top 5 to 10 keywords. You’ll know which ones seem to mean the most in your niche. Write down the number of monthly searches for each one.

We want to compare the number of searches for each keyword, per month, with the number of competitors out there with web sites for those searches. Do a normal Google search for each of your top 5-10 keywords. Look at the number of total pages out there that use that phrase. At the top of the page, it will say, to the right, “Results 1-10 of about NNNNNNNN”. Write down that number of other pages next to that keyword.

You now have a list of keywords, the number of searches per month and the number of other pages that contain that keyword. If anything jumps out at you, you might have a good idea which keywords to target. If nothing jumps out, do the math. Divide the number of pages by the number of searches. This gives you a ratio. Compare the ratios. Pick the top 3-5 keywords that you think you have the best chance of beating, that is, the most searches compared to the least number of pages for that search.

Does that make sense? You’re trying to find out what keywords you want to try to rank for. Everything else we do for SEO depends on picking these keywords well. You can always readjust later, but pick good ones to start with.

Now that you have your list of keywords, we’ll move on to what to do with them in the next part.

JumpDomain Whois

The easiest thing to do is go to an old registrar that quit answering my emails so I moved all of my domain names away from them. They had non-existant customer support, so I’m sure they won’t mind us using their tools.

https://domains.jumpdomain.com/whois/whois.cgi

Go to the URL above and put in your domain name. Hit Submit Query. It will also return all of the DNS info. Bookmark that page. I use it all the time. It’s by far the easiest and fastest way to look up available domain names without getting into trouble.

Whois?

First, if you are a Mac user (and I won’t get into that religious debate now), if you go into your utilities folder, there is an application called “Network Utility”. If you open that up, you’ll see all of the tools listed across the top. Click on “Whois”.

You can type in the domain name you want to check on and click on the “Whois” button. It will return all of the DNS info for that domain name or it will say “No match for…” the domain name you are looking for.

Terminal Whois on a Mac

If you are brave, you can open the Terminal application and type in “whois” followed by the domain name. That will also give you the DNS info.

Network Solutions is waiting for you to search for an available domain name using their site.

With that as background, I got a comment or two from Jack Carlson, who, again, I really appreciate for commenting. He defended NetSol and I had to question if I was right about their practices or not. I know what happened to me and a client of mine. Maybe they saw the error of their ways and changed their practices. I needed to reevaluate.

I checked Wikipedia (and since it’s on the Internet, it must be right of course,) and they also had references that all seem to check out. I think this section below is probably true. It matches my experiences and my client’s. Please click through and read the whole thing.

What do you think? Have you ever had a good or a bad experience with NetSol? Please leave a comment and we’ll all battle it out in the never ending search for the truth.

Network Solutions – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Controversy over domain name front running

There is evidence that there are parties subscribing to this information which are buying some of these domains within milliseconds of them being de-registered.

Network Solutions Inc offer a search engine which permits users to find out if a domain name is available for purchase.[18] Unregistered domain names entered into this search engine are then speculatively reserved by Network Solutions. [18] It should be noted this “reservation” can be removed by anyone immediately by contacting Network Solutions customer service hotline, or it will automatically unreserve within 4 days, allowing the domain to be freely registered anywhere. Also, visitors searching for domain names on their website allow the reservation when they click “OK” on the Reservation Confirmation dialog box. Clicking cancel will prevent the domain name from being reserved.

On January 8, 2008 Domain Name Wire published a story alleging that Network Solutions practices domain name front running.[18] “If you try to register a domain at Network Solutions, but decide not to register it, you won’t be able to register it anywhere else,” the article says.[18] “Network Solutions registers the domain in its company name with the words ‘This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com’.”[18] Circle ID reported on January 8, 2008 that Jonathon Nevett, Vice President of Policy at Network Solutions and one of the seven members of the ICANN community who was consulted by the ICANN committee looking at domain tasting abuse,[19] had offered a response to the news story stating Network Solution’s policy.[20] The policy was “a security measure to protect our customers,” said Nevett.[20] “When a customer searches for an available domain name at our website, but decides not to purchase the name immediately after conducting the search,” Nevett added, “after the search ends, we will put the domain name on reserve.”[20] Nevett said that if the domain was “not purchased within 4 days, it will be released back to the registry and will be generally available for registration.”[18]

Jay Westerdal, one of the seven members of the ICANN community who was consulted by the ICANN committee looking at domain tasting abuse,[19] published an article on Domain Tools on January 8, 2008 stating that Network Solutions is exposing the domains to domain tasters.[21] The domain tasters “will snipe those domain up milliseconds after Network Solutions deletes them,” says Westerdal.[21] “It is a deplorable action that Network Solution would announce potential domain names to the entire world,” Westerdal added.[21] On January 8, 2008, Tucows, the largest publicly traded domain name registrar, published an article on their company web site titled “Registrar Reputation and Trust” criticizing Network Solutions policy.[22] “Potential Registrants are effectively forced to purchase the domain from Network Solutions for a period of four days at which point the domain is dropped,” wrote Tucows employee James Koole.[22] Koole says that Tucows has found a way to address the issue of domain tasting and have policies in place that uphold the rights of Registrants.[22] “Tucows works to prevent domain name tasting by charging our Resellers a monetary fee on domain name registrations that are cancelled within the five-day Add Grace Period (AGP),” Koole said.[22] “Tucows doesn’t use WHOIS query data or search data from our API to front-run domain names,” Koole added.[22]

On January 9, 2008, Cnet reported that Network Solutions will soon not register domains when people search for domains from the company’s Whois search page, will offer only an “under construction” page for sites that it has reserved, and newly reserved pages won’t be linked to the numerical Internet addresses that allow Web browsers to locate the pages.[23] Network Solutions will continue to register domains when people search for domains from the company’s home page.[23]

There is evidence that there are parties subscribing to this information which are buying some of these domains within milliseconds of them being de-registered.[19][21] This occurs for thousands upon thousands of domains, with a certain percentage then eventually being bought by the original party, providing a profit. [19][21]

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