“Israel.com” domain name was sold for $5.88 million. The identity of the buyer is still not revealed.

In May, 2008, Moniker, a internet domain registrar announced in their website that they would be auctioning the domain “Israel.com” for a price of $5.5 million. Many felt that the price is unrealistic and would not turn out to be a postivite bid. The auction website www.auctioninfo.org carried out the process. Surprisingly, the domain auction ended within six days on May 23rd.

Currently, the domain still does not contain a website and just contains PPC advertisements redirecting users to tourism, history and travel websites. It would be interesting to note the content of the site when launched.

Joel Noel Friedman, aJewish American was the previous owner of the domain, “Israel.com”. Speaking to www.auctioninfo.org, Friedman mentioned that he didn’t expect the domain to be valuded so high when be bought it in 1994.

The 46 year old further mentioned that he had originally registered the domain name in his name fearing that the domain might be misused by someone else. He had auctioned the domain name as a tribute to the Israel’s 60th anniversary.

Buying domain names with popular names is common and is considered as an investment as the domain is usually sold for a higher rate. Some resort to buying common mistyped company names or resemble any popular company to make some quick traffic. To overcome this, major companies buy all related domain names. The cost of common .com domain names are around $10 while popular keyword domains are sold in thousands.

Have you purchased a domain name and wish to have the site hosted in 110MB free hosting? Please follow the steps below to configure your account properly.

1. First create the subdomain at 110MB. Your website would be now mywebste.110MB.com
2. Find out the IP address of this particular domain. You can find that out by pinging the address in the command prompt [Start>Run>Type "cmd"] using the following command.
   ping yourwebsite.110mb.com
   Note down this IP address.
3. Now, log into your Godaddy Domain Control Panel.
4. Click on the domain that you wish to point to 110MB. You would find various information about the domain listed like nameserver, registrant address, admin address, forwarding, email etc.
5. Click on the Edit DNS information.
6. Under MX Records, choose edit for the A record and specify the IP address that you noted down.
7. Close the Edit DNS. You would have to wait few minutes or sometimes hours for the IP change to take place.
8. Meanwhile, log into the 110MB control panel, and choose Account Profile under Account Management & Upgrades
9. Now specify your domain name under Add your Own Domain
10. Click on “Add/Remove My Own Domain Now!”

Now patience would do the trick. Wait for some time and try checking your domain. It should now direct to the 110MB account. GoDaddy does this faster. However, for many other hosting providers, it takes up to 3 days.

Often when hosting a site, we find that the www is ripped off and just the domain name is displayed on the URL. Search engines would consider this to be a different domain. For example, though http://seo-mind.com and http://www.seo-mind.com is similar, search engines tend to recognize them as two separate domains. As a result, the page rank is split among the domains and loses out on link popularity.

Resolution:
The correct way to resolve this issue is to have a 301 redirect on the server pointing to either a www or a non-www domain alone. To do this, one has to instruct the server to redirect any faulty domains. This is quite easy in a Apache server with a .htaccess file. We will now discuss how this can be done on a Apache and on a IIS server.

WWW 301 Redirect on Microsoft IIS Server

1. In IIS, create a new virtual or IP-based website with the name http://yourwebsite.com
2. Check the server header to find out if the server response is 200 OK.
3. Now, add the ASP code below to your default home page in http://yourwebsite.com

< %@ Language=VBScript %>
< % Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", http://www.yourwebsite.com
%>

4. Your redirect is now completed. Check using your browser with a non-www url to see if the domain gets redirected.

WWW 301 Redirect on Apache Server

1. Find out from your hosting provider if Apache Rewrite Module is turned on. If you have a dedicated server or you have access to the httpd.conf file, you can enable the Rewrite yourself by just uncommenting the line below:

LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

2. Now, download the .htaccess file from the root location on your server and make a copy of it and store the copy separately on your local system. This is important because if the .htaccess file that you modified does not work, you would have to replace it with the original file or you might face serious website issues.
3. Now, open the .htaccess file using Notepad or EditPlus and just add the following codes on it.RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
4. Upload the file back to the server and test using the browser if the redirect works.
5. If it does not work or if you face any other issues, please upload the .htaccess copy that you stored in your local system on the server immediately.

Well, have you landed on a site with an .hk extension? It is advisable to better close the website and search for another website. Your computer can end up with a whole lot of malwares, adwares and spywares.

A recent report from McAfee reports that19.2 percent of all websites that ended with the .hk domain was posing a security threat to web users. China follows the list of dangerous domains with 11 percent of sites in .cn posing a security threat.

Finland with .fi extension is listed as the safest online destination with only 0.05 percent of its domains posing a security threat. This position was previously held by Ireland with .is domain extension. Japan holds the second position for the second safest destination on the internet with its .jp extension.

These reports by McAfee were based on an analysis of 9.9 million heavily-trafficked websites from 265 different countries.

The report also provided some serious issues in the internet.
-Sites claiming free ringtones and screensavers actually load viruses, adwares and spywares in them. This has increased to 4.7 percent in 2008, a 1.4 percent increase from 2007.
- Chances of downloading an adware, virus or a spyware from a website have increased to a whooping 41.5% over the year 2007.

What is an AGP

The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), have an option of choosing a five-day “Grace Period” during registration of a domain. During this grace period, the registrant can test the domain or decide on keeping it. If the registrant chooses to cancel the domain, the payment would be fully refunded by the domain registry.

This privilege provided to registrars by ICANN has been under major controversy as millions of domains are being registered and discontinued everyday. Many domain registrars like Network Solutions have started using this option abusively acquiring domain names which are being searched in their domain search box.

Almost 80% – 95% of all domains registered with major domain registrars are being cancelled during this Grace Period.

This practice is being carried on for the past eight years with IAregistry and DotRegistrar registering many domain names and deleting them when they don’t need it. When they found this practice to be profitable, they started using various methods and technologies to find out the top domains searched for and all possible name options helping them figure out the best profitable domain names. They later started acquiring these domain names and then deleted them before the grace period was over if they found it not to be profitable.

Critics feel there is no actual need for this practice. ICANN should request the registrar to pay for any domain purchased and there should not be any refund or grace period. In January 2008, ICANN mentioned that they would withdraw this AGP offer.

However, VeriSign has been against this Domain Tasting from the early 2001 and has been preventing registrars use this method abusively.

If you are finding out domain name options and suggestions using Network Solutions website, BEWARE! You would end up losing the domain to Network Solutions. They would take a Client Hold of it for the next 4 days.

Network Solutions, a ICANN accredited register has been using a mean way to force users to register domain names with them. Domain tasting, as it is called, is used by domain name registrant to test the marketability of a domain. The registrant is given a five-day “grace period” in which he can cancel the registration and avail a full refund from the domain registry.

This type of Domain Tasting has come into wide spread critizisam as registars and PPC companies use these domains to force users use their company or to make some quick money using PPC.

The ICANN Board of Directors has come up with a decision to stop the practice of domain tasting. One of the main reasons for this resolution is due to the unethical hacking of domain searches by Network Solutions.

The Board of Directors informed that the practice of domain tasting during the Add Grace Period (AGP) has become high from 2005 and that millions of domains are registered and deleted because of this Add Grace Period option. Hence, the ICANN believes that the withdrawal of refunding transaction fee would end this abuse of Add Grace Period (AGP).

This will put an end to typo-squatting and the quick money making PPC domain tasting industry. This would also mean an end to Network Solutions and other registrars using the AGP feature in an abusive way.

Google has planned to stop revenues from Adsense if the domain is less than five days old. This policy if implemented would be a disaster to websites who earn millions of dollars using the AGP or the Add Grace Period method. This is expected to be implemented before the month of March.

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Does buying multiple domains help improve search engine rankings? Link building being a major step in SEO companies and optimizers have sort after purchasing multiple domains to increase their rankings. Using this strategy they tend to quickly increase quality links from .org, .net and other domains useful for ranking.

However, claims are that “Google resets all backward links to a site once it knows that the domain has been expired or reset.”

Now, how about if the site expires when no one is aware or it happens accidentally? What if the domain is transfered? We do not have much information about this. However, Matt does mention not to register unrelated domains in an attempt to get those pre-existing links to your account.