domain purchase

Recently, when I tried to buy hosting space from Godaddy, I landed up in a page stating, “There was a problem authorizing your credit. Please verify your payment information or use an alternate form of payment.” after I provided my credit card information.

There was no further information on the reason this could have happened. I have been using the same card on GoDaddy and have made at least 10 purchases and my credit limit was still more than $800.

I googled this issue and found that similar issues have happened with people using paypal but not credit card. Anyone who has had similar issues please let me know.

“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.

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.