The Secret: Dropped Domains

This is the question that everyone wants to know, or at least anyone trying to make a quick profit off of domains. In a previous post titled Why do people buy domains?, I covered that you either buy domains to sell for profit or establish into sites. I said that if your doing it for profit, the majority of the good domains are registered. In this post I’m going to cover how you get those valuable domains.

What Are Dropped Domains?

Anyone who has ever bought a domain knows that when they buy it, they have bought it for a fixed amount of time (usually 1 year). When that time expires, a few things happen. Either the owner renews it right away, or a whole procedure takes place. The following is how it happens:

1. The customer buys the domain for a given amount of time. That time expires and he/she forgets to renew it.

2. The domain is ‘expired’ and the owner is given up to 40 days to pay the renewal cost. During this time, all services are shut off but the owner can still renew it for a standard renewal cost

3. After 40 days have passed, the domains status changes to “redemption period”. The WhoIs information will start to disappear and the owner now has to pay around $100 to re-active it. If this happens, the chances are that the owner is finished with the domain name.

4. Now the domain is as its status implies, ‘locked’. It’s to late, the owner has already missed his window of opportunity.

5. Five days later, anywhere from 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM (Pacific) the name becomes available (dropped).

The whole process is about 75 days long…

Getting Dropped Domains

Don’t think that once the domain has expired, your going to just be able to waltz in there and snatch it. If the name is good enough, there are going to be hundreds if not thousands of others trying to get that same domain name. Now this is not always the case, if the domain name is personalized for your company such as GregConsulting.com (no it is not taken for all you Greg’s out there), you most likely will not have a problem.

For the rest of you who are trying to get premium or valuable domains, the entire process can become extremely tricky. It really is an all out brutal war. Sure there are services such as GoDaddy’s Backorder that grab the domain name for you if no one else has done the same, but if they have backordered as well, then it is an entirely other question. Some services work better then others on different days. That is why if you are adamant in your decision to buy it, you have to use a variety of services and be willing to spend a fair amount of money if an auction takes place.

The Drop

This is a three hour period in which the domain name is deleted from VeriSign’s servers, and released out into the public. Now this is something that you should know, never try to manually get a valuable domain name during the drop process by yourself. There are many services that do it for you, and I am going to list the best three. What they do is use a variety of registrars to try to acquire the domain names at constant yet frequent intervals. All of these services will attempt to get the requested domain names and will charge you if successful, but won’t if their not. They all have different reasons that set themselves apart, therefore because they don’t charge you if they fail, you should use all of them.

I would like to clarify that to backorder something is placing an interest in it and then if there are others that have done the same, an all out action takes place.

NameJet.com - Owned by eNom and similar to what ClubDrop used to be like, this service does not have a backorder cost.

There is no cost to place a Backorder request using the NameJet service. Domain name auction winners on NameJet will be required to pay the Backorder amount entered by the user for single bidder auctions and will pay the highest winning bid auction price for any multi-bidder auctions.

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SnapNames.com - The backorder cost for this service is dependent on the minimum bid price listed in the search results when looking for a particular domain. This only happens if you are the only one buying that specific domain, otherwise just like the other service, it goes into auction.

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Pool.com - Widely thought of as the #1 service as far as the success rates go, they have an extremely large registrar partner network. The backorder price starts at $60 and will gradually decrease until it is purchased or until the expiration time of the auction. If there are two or more backorders, you guessed it… Action time!

Can Dropped Domain Names Be Dangerous?

They sure can! They are usually dangerous when the previous owners used them suspiciously that put the particular domain in a certain position. Note that when you buy a previously owned domain, whatever they did to get your domain in trouble will stay with it. They don’t know that it has new owners, and they aren’t going to check because they don’t care. The following will list all of the reasons why it can be dangerous:

1. Spam - Search engines, websites, email providers and users. This is something that you will most likely never be able to change. Once you have been banned, you will most likely stay that way forever.

2. Illegal Activities - Hosting of cinema movies, sharing .MP3 files for free. This will remain the sites reputation for a while and could even get you in trouble if they think that you were the previous owner.

3. Unjustified Use of Copyrighted Materials - Self explanatory. The previous owner could have completely copy and pasted others work to use on their site and any number of other examples.

Check It Out!

Make sure that you check out what your website on Archive.org’s WayBackMachine. This can usually give you a pretty good idea of what your website had done the last few years.