Comments: I recently started a website with (deleted name of host) which is a do-it-yourself web hosting site.  After a week or so, I think I’m about ready to throw in the towel!  The problem is that I’ve paid for my domain for the next 4 years!!  Can you all build my site through the existing host so I don’t lose my money?  I want a great website at an affordable cost (I’m sure you’ve never heard that before!)

I work in the area and could stop by your office at some point.  My website is (deleted)

Thanks,

(name deleted)

See my reply after the jump.

The Short Answer:
No, you will not lose the years that are pre-paid on your domain names.

The Long Answer:
When you purchase a domain name, you buy it from a registrar. Registrars don’t (can’t) force you to use their hosting company.  If you are the person that owns that domain name, you can point it at ANY hosting company for as long as you own it.   Each domain name has a pair of information entries for the name servers that are associated with your domain name.   Remember that and say it with me “NAME SERVERS”.    Those two name server addresses serve as the “zip code” for your domain, and it points the domain name that you own to some host on the web.  Since you are the owner of your domain name, you can login to your domain registrar (godaddy, network solutions, tucows, etc.) and change those name server entries.  Once you do that, all email and web hosting traffic will then be pointed at your new host.  Make sure that you choose a host first, setup an account with the host, setup email accounts, and then move the domain name last so that you don’t have downtime.

Now, since you are worried about losing $40 or so on your domain names, and you want something “great at an affordable cost”, we should probably meet or have a phone conversation to discuss what an “affordable cost” and what “great” is. 

You can lookup the registration on almost any domain name by using a “whois” search. A generic one can be found here: http://www.internic.net/whois.html. The whois search result will tell you when your domain name will expire. What most people don’t realize, is that domain names can be registered up to TEN YEARS into the future. If you are confident that you will be using your domain name well into the future, then you should register it for at least three years right away. The reason is because spammers and sploggers (people who generate splogs) only register their domain names for short periods of time, while legitimate businesses tend to register their domain names for more than one year. Search engines now look at this data to determine the trustworthiness of your website. In the case of Google, this data is used (in addition to other data), to give your site a trustworthiness ranking (The Google Page Rank).

What most people don’t realize, is that domain

names can be registered up to TEN YEARS into the future.

Back in the old days, all you had to do was to focus on creating Meta Tags and Page Titles for your website to come up high in search engines. Today, search engines are WAY WAY more sophisticated than that. Even things like your domain name registration can affect your online success. Adding a couple of years to your domain name won’t make you number one in Google search results, but it is one of many things that Google looks at.

What does all that mean? It means that your older domains could possibly come up higher in Google, and that you should consider working some of your older domain names into your marketing plan.

Some of my more tech-savvy customers have noticed this as well, and some have begun to experiment by consolidating their web site content from multiple domain names, onto the older domain names that have a higher pagerank.

Here is how it works. Google’s pagerank is on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 10. A 10 would be Yahoo or Google, while a 1 would be a brand new website. Most small websites that have a decent number of inbound links have a pagerank of 3 or so. The New York Times website has a pagerank of 7. This should give you an idea of how much the traffic jumps between each level. Our Delaware.Net website has a pagerank of 6, and we are hoping to get that to a 7 pretty soon. One of the things that helps our site is the fact that the domain name is TEN YEARS OLD. This makes the domain appear to be more trustworthy to Google, and this “domain age” is one of the factors that we believe Google is looking at. Google won’t come right out and admit this, but our research tells us that this is true.

What we have seen is that sometimes a site that has little content, and little optimization, can have a 5 or 6 page rank, which is VERY valuable in terms of SEO. An old domain that you are using as a redirect to a newer domain name could also have a higher pagerank than your main website’s URL.

The trick, obviously, is to decide how you can use your extra domain names to generate more traffic for your main website. One idea is to make the older domain your MAIN domain name. I have seen some customers do this, and I think it could be a little extreme. Your main company’s website URL should be the one that is marketed the most, and it should be the one that is printed on your signage, shirts, printed materials, etc. I don’t think you should change your whole brand to take advantage of this technique.

Here are some ideas for your older URLs:

1. Make a list of all of your URLs. Take note of when they were registered, and when they expire. Rank them by age, and how appropriate the names are to your business.
2. Add years to your primary domain names. We now know that Google will keep a domain from gaining a high page rank if it will expire in less than a year. If you plan to stay in business for a long period of time, add at least 5 years to your main domain name.
3. Elimiate domain redirects that could cause your older domains to get blacklisted. Instead, create a small website on each domain name. I refer to these as “microsites”. You can use them to highlight different products and services with a unique set of keywords.
4. Eliminate duplicate content. Don’t be tempted to past your main website content into the microsites. This will create a “blanding” effect, which will hurt all of your sites in Google.
5. Create “shelf domains”. A shelf domain is a website that sits on the shelf, waiting to be used for some time in the future. So what you do is try to anticipate domains you will need in the future for products that you are working on, or services that you may offer in the future.
6. Use separate domain names for products and services. There is no rule that states that all of your products and services need to reside under a single domain name. Using separate domains allows you to generate separate keywords and search phrases for each site.
7. Use multiple domains for different vertical markets. If you have a vertical market that you service that is very specific, you could use one of your older domain names to target that specific market, and use search phrases in the text that are appropriate for that audience.
8. Use the older domain names for email. Variations on your corporate domain that are short could be used for email addresses. While older domains might work best in Google, shorter ones will be easier to remember when used for email addresses.
9. Blogs. Another use of extra domain names would be for a company or personal blog site, which could help direct more traffic to your site. Google rewards blog sites because it sees them as unique content, so you could use your older domains for a blog.
10. Partner directory. Use one of your spare domains to market your customers and business partners. After linking to them, ask them to link back to your MAIN website. The inbound links will help with your Google page rank.

I hope that these tips help you to get more out of the domain names that you might be sitting on, or that you may consider letting them expire. A somewhat relevant domain name that you own that is really old just migh tbe worth holding on to.

In a nutshell, here is the problem:

Let’s say for the purpose of this example your domain name is “MyCompany.com“.
A potential customers hears about your company, and decides to check out your web site and learn more about your company.
So the customer goes to their web browser and types in “http://MyCompany.com”, and hits “GO” expecting to see your web site.

Then – Nothing. Your site doesn’t appear.

Realizing their mistake, more savvy web users realize that they forgot to put “www” before your domain name. So if entered correctly, the domain would look like this: http://www.MyCompany.com. But many, many, many people are too lazy to enter the entire domain name into their browser. You may assume that both domains are the same, but in actuality they are not. The “WWW” part of the domain name is called the hostname, or the subdomain. These are setup on the web server, and have to be entered by your hosting company when they setup your web hosting.

All about subdomains

It’s important to note that when you buy a domain name, your are buying the MyCompany.com portion, but you can put WHATEVER YOU WANT as a subdomain in front of the domain. At the very most basic domain name setup, you should have the WWW and empty hostnames setup so that they both reach your web site. But there are other subdomains that you should consider for your web site, as each subdomain can be used for a part of your web site, an application (like a blog), or for separate web sites entirely.

Sample subdomains

• WWW – again, every site has this to reach your home page. Sample: http://www.MyCompany.com
• MAIL or WEBMAIL – this is an easy way to create a link to your webmail program, or your email server. Sample: http://mail.MyCompany.com
• BLOG – obviously enough, you can use a subdomain to point to your blog. Sample: http://blog.MyCompany.com
• HELP – this is an easy way to give your customers a reference site for help in using your site or services. http://help.MyCompany.com
• CLIENTS, MY, or EXTRA – this is an easy way to make a client area where your clients can log into your web site. We use “extra”, which is short for “Extranet”
• INTRA, or STAFF – use these subdomains to create an Intranet site for your staff to access. Call Delaware.Net for information on how to create an Intranet.

Do lots of subdomains help with search engine ranking?

No. Neither does purchasing many domains. I’ve seen companies purchase domain names with the word “delaware” in them hoping this will help them with local search ranking, and it doesn’t. Domains help with memorizing how to get to your company’s web site, and that’s it. Its better to have one good domain name than to have many. I own “delaware.com”, and it is amazing how many people simply type it in to reach it. A big portal is a coming to that site soon.

So don’t forget…

Make sure all of your sites come up without the “WWW” in front of them. It can save a lot of missed web traffic! Good Luck.

The site is www.leapfish.com. The domain name that I tested was “ce.net”, which will be the domain name that we are going to use for our upcoming version of Store-Logic, which we are going to call “Commerce Engine”. It’s a nice, short domain name that I have had for some time. LeapFish says that the domain name is worth $450,846.00.

That is really good news for me, right? I own a domain name that is worth half a million dollars. The sad thing is that the estimate isn’t accurate. There is no way that a web site could accurately determine what someone would be willing to pay for the domain name. Sex.com was a domain name that was recently sold for $12 million dollars, and at one point leapfish said the sex.com domain name was worth $60 million dollars. Now when you enter that domain into leapfish it says it is worth $14 million. Who knows?

Another site that has a domain name valuation tool on it is called NameBoy. NameBoy will email you valuations for several domains at one time, and the valuations are a little lower (more reasonable) than LeapFish.

I don’t trust either of these sites, but I think it’s fun to play with them and see what a domain name might be worth. Try out the sites, and let me know if you get a decent valuation on the domains that you own.

$450,846.00

Searching for Available Domain Names

There are many places on the web where you can search domain names to see what is available, and who owns the domain names that are already taken. A domain name search is called a “whois lookup”. We have a whois lookup form here. You can also find an easy to use lookup at http://www.internic.org.

How to Choose a Domain Name

As long as the web has been around, one of the most difficult and personal decisions a company must make is choosing their Internet domain name. Good, unique domain names are hard to find sometimes, especially those that end in “.com”. You may find that the “nameofyourcompany.com” is already taken by someone else, and this can be a stressful realization.

What to do when the domain name you want is already taken

• Explore buying it from a squatter – This isn’t the most attractive option, but if you really have your heart set on a domain name that is already taken, then you might be able to purchase it from the current owner. If the domain name you want is taken, then look to see if there is a web site on it. Many individuals still to this day speculate on domain names (known as squatters), and they purchase them hoping to make a profit. When there is no web site on a domain name, or when there is a simple under construction page on the site, then it may be for sale. When you do the whois on the domain name, look to see who owns it, and how they list their contact information. Sometimes it is obvious that the domain name was registered by a speculator because the name of the company that owns the domain name is listed as something like “Domain For Sale”. Beware that no two domain name squatters are the same. Some will ask for $200 for a domain name and others will want $20,000 or more. If the domain name squatter is unreasonable, then move on and don’t waste your time. The average amount I have seen them ask for is about $2000. It is a supply and demand situation, so only you can decide what you are willing to pay for a domain name. Be very careful how you purchase the domain and get something in writing or use an escrow service. There are many such services you can find using a search engine.

• Wait for the domain you want to expire – A lot of people assume that they can just wait for a domain name to expire, then scoop it up on the expiration date. After all, you can see the expiration date when you do a whois search. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. When a domain name expires, it isn’t immediately available to be purchased. Instead, it goes into a sort of “hold” status for about 45 days so that the original owner can reclaim it. Waiting for a domain name to expire is almost NEVER a good idea, especially when they are automatically being re-registered.

• Registrar Warning: Domain registrars use this hold status as an opportunity to charge domain owners a re-registration penalty fee once the original expiration date passes. How nice of them. Some registrars also prevent domain names to be moved to other registrars when they are close to their expiration date (even before they expire). Lets say that your domain name is about to expire in 20 days, and you choose to move it to another registrar. Some registrars won’t let you until you pay for ANOTHER year of registration.

• Another Registrar Warning: It is now getting MUCH harder to purchase expired domains because they are being automatically re-registered the MOMENT they are available. Almost ANY web site that has the least little bit of traffic on it is being re-registered by unscrupulous companies that use the domains for “link farms”, “splogs”, and they fill them with content from “blog scraper” content or other search links. You have probably seen one of these sites when you accidentally typed a domain name in incorrectly. A link farm is a plain-looking, small, cheesy search engine that is completely automated. Domains couldn’t be automatically re-registered to these companies unless they had inside help from registrars, and this is part of the problem with the domain name registry system today. Why does someone go through all this trouble to re-register domain names and put bogus content on them? Simple: Google and other sites pay people for link traffic. There are many stories in the news about people that do this and make a full-time living off of these junk web sites. It isn’t illegal, but it should be.

Add a hyphen to the name you want – Adding a hyphen is an easy way to find an available alternative to the name you want. Most special characters are not allowed, but hyphens are allowed.

Use an optional TLD – If the .COM suffix (known as a Top Level Domain, or TLD) is not available, many companies also choose to use “.NET” or “.US” or “.ORG” or “.INFO” or “.TV”. There are MANY more TLDs, but these that I have mentioned are the most popular. They sort of all work the same, but most of the different TLDs represent countries (.TV is an example). Some registrars charge a little more for TLDs like “.US”. Obviously, .COM is always the best choice if it is available, because most people are used to seeing them and typing them in.

Avoid .INFO – I personally do not recommend the .INFO TLD because they are used quite a bit by spammers and especially sploggers. This is because they can be purchased in bulk cheaply. Some spam filtering solutions give a stronger weight to these domains.Use your location – Sometimes adding a city or state name or abbreviation can help differentiate you from another company located somewhere else that has the same name as your company.

Trademarked Names and Words – Be careful not to use trademarks in your domain name that do not belong to you. Large law firms now employ special Internet search tools to look for infringements on trademarks that their clients own.
Service Categories – Think about the services that you offer. If your company specializes in a particular area that is specific, that might be a way to find more words to use in your domain name.

Product Names – Like service categories, if you have specific products that you wish to market on your web site, then perhaps they can be part of your domain name.
Adjectives – Think about the types of people that buy from you, and the adjectives that people use to describe the products that you sell. Also consider the advantages of your product or service. An online thesaurus can help.
Slogans (taglines) – A short tagline for you company can make a nice domain name if it is short enough.

Abbreviations and Acronyms – Many domain names that are 4-5 letters are now all taken. Every combination. But if you are one of the lucky ones that has an acronym that is still available, it could be your best domain name. But be careful about difficult acronyms. Sometimes a word is easier to remember than an acronym.

Keep Your Names Short

While it may be tempting to keep adding words to your domain name, the golden rule is to keep them as short as possible. Longer domain names DO NOT help with search engines. Search engines give little or no relevance to the words in your domain. The longer your domain name is, the harder it is for your clients to type it in. Also don’t forget that your domain name is used for branded email as well. This means that everyone who wants to email you will also have to type in your new domain name every time they type your email address.

The domain you want is available! Now what?

You need to register it. The question is, which registrar should you use? Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Enom, Delaware.Net, or who? There are hundreds of domain name registrars, and hundreds of thousands of resellers of these registrars. Delaware.Net is a reseller of TuCows, which is the most ethical and friendly registrar for hosting companies. When you register a domain name with my company, we use TuCows or another quality registrar. You still own your domain name, and resellers like us only make a dollar or two on domain name registrations. There isn’t a lot of profit (if any) in this part of the business. There are companies that I do not recommend, including GoDaddy and Enom. Enom is the provider for Domain Registry of America, which is one of those companies that sends people fake renewal invoices in the mail hoping that people will renew their domain with them accidentally. As long as Enom allows this to go on, I can’t recommend them. GoDaddy is an inexpensive domain registrar because they use (sell) your information, and they WILL target your with advertisements for their hosting services. Obviously, most hosting companies can’t recommend GoDaddy for this reason, but that is the reason why GoDaddy is a couple of dollars cheaper than other registrars (because they make up the loss by selling your information and upselling other services to you). Network Solutions is also a domain name registrar that I do not recommend. Network Solutions has the worst support, and they make it VERY hard for their customers to get information changed. They also make it very painful when you are trying to move your domains away from them to other registrars. Network Solutions is one of those companies that charges penalties when you try to move your domain name away when it is close to its expiration date. Always read the fine print of your registrar’s terms and conditions before you chose them.

Make sure you own your domain name after you pay for it

I know this title looks strange, but it is possible to purchase a domain name and still not be the owner of it. This is very rare today, but I still see this happen from time to time. Always make sure that if someone else is registering your domain name for you, that this information is accurate, and the administration contact information should be someone that will be with the organization for some time, and who is trustworthy.

When a domain name is registered, there are three areas of the registration form for contact information:

• Registrant – this is the organization that owns the domain name. Make sure that this is the legal name of your company.
• Administrative Contact – This is the person that has the authoritative rights to change the domain name information.
• Technical Contact – this contact information is usually that of the hosting company that is hosting the domain.

Again, make sure that this information is accurate ANNUALLY, and always make sure that someone at your company is the administration contact. Don’t let your web designer or hosting company be the admin contact. Also make sure it is your company’s name and address in the registrant section. If this information is not yours, then you can lose ownership of your domain name.

How many domain names should you register?

If you have a few names that you have a hard time deciding on, and you feel in your gut that they are all good choices, then register them all. Domains are inexpensive, after all, so grab a few if you think you will actually use them. Just don’t go hog-wild. I had one client that came to me after he registered 1,500 domain names, back when they were $35 each just a few years ago. That cost him $52,500 retail PER YEAR! He didn’t end up paying full price, but he had received bad advice from someone that told him registering his name a bunch of different ways would help him with search engines. If he had come to me first, I could have saved him a lot of money. He ended up wasting about $80,000 on useless domain names. I myself have about 50 domain names after being in this industry for ten years, and I actually use about half of them. Unless you are a really large company or you have lots of products that each need to be trademarked, then I would keep your domains to five or ten tops.

Reasons for Registering Multiple Domain Names

Sometimes it makes sense to register more than one domain name for your organization. Here are some instances where it makes sense:

* Ad Campaigns – When I see a domain name for a company in an advertisement that has additional information attached to it for tracking purposes, it sometimes turns me off. Sometimes I see that and I only type in the root domain. So if an add in the Wall Street Journal says “visit our web site at www.oursite.com/wsj”, I might not type in the “wsj” because I know that is just for tracking. A more clever way to track ad campaigns is to create a domain name around the ad campaign that doesn’t necessarily contain your company’s name. Keep in mind that if you have a good web analytics reporting system at your disposal, it is not necessary to register additional domains, beca

* Mailing List Domains – If you have a successful web site today without using an email mailing list, then consider yourself lucky. An email mailing list that keeps your company’s name fresh in your client’s minds is a very important part of web marketing. The down side of mailing lists is that they can sometimes be mistakenly flagged as spam, even if they are completely opt-in. There are many reasons why this can happen, and I will cover them in another article. To keep your main email safe and not blocked, it makes sense to use a separate domain name for your email campaigns. So if your domain name is someorganization.com, you could have a domain name like someorganziationnews.com to keep your business email from being blocked. Using a mailing list service is also another option that you can use to protect your main domain, but you could use your own email list domain to host an archive of your previous newsletters.

Reasons to NOT Register Multiple Domain Names

• Sub-Domains (hostnames) can sometimes work just as well – When you host your new domain name with a web site hosting company, it is possible to create additional sub-domains, AKA hostnames for free.

• Domains don’t help with search engine placement – Some people assume that their domain name choice will have a big affect on search engine ranking. This is not true. The content and popularity of your web site will have an affect on your search engine positioning, but your domain name will not. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is out of the scope of this article, but I will post more articles on this soon.

How many years should you register your domain names for?

Domain names can now be pre-registered for up to ten years. If your domain name matches the name of your business, or you are sure that you are going to keep your domain name for years to come, then I would recommend registering it for at least three years. This eliminates any chance of forgetting to renew your domain name.

Don’t lose your domain name by accident!

It IS possible to lose your domain name if the company you register it from doesn’t alert you when your domain is close to expiration. One thing that I have seen happen, is that someone will register their domain name for just one year, then they change their email address. This is a MAJOR problem for that person because registrars ONLY try to contact you by email. If you change your email address and you don’t change it on your domain name registrations, then your registrar will not be able to contact you. If one of my customers has their domain name registered with us, and it is getting close to expiration, we actually pick up the phone and try to contact them before they lose it. This is rare but it does happen. Many people assume that their hosting company is liable for their domain name renewals, and this is not the case. You are responsible for your own domain names and their renewals. It is a really good idea to put a reminder on your calendars so that you don’t miss your domain renewal anniversaries.

Good Luck!

The domain name registry system, process, and competitive landscape is getting more complex, just as web sites and email are getting more complicated. I hope that these tips help you to find the perfect domain name for your web site. If you have any questions about this article, or about domain names in general, post them here in my blog.