GoDaddy confirms it is no longer offering premium auctions on its TDNAM service.

On Monday I wrote about how TDNAM appeared to no longer offer premium auctions. I wasn’t able to get a clear answer from GoDaddy support, but today I received a response to my message to the GoDaddy Office of the President:

Dear Andrew,

Thank you for the email.

We appreciate you bringing this to our attention. Please accept our
apology for any confusion there has been regarding this matter. We no
longer offer Premium Auctions through TDNAM and want to apologize for
any inconvenience this may cause. As the Premium Auctions are no
longer offered we would like to offer to refund $17.99 to you for the
purchase of the Cash Parking Premium plan. If you wish to continue
using the Cash Parking Premium plan then you will be charged at the
next billing cycle. Please be advised if you do not wish to continue
using the Cash Parking plan as the Premium Auctions are no longer
offered you will need to cancel the plan from within your account. If
you would like us to refund the $17.99 please reply with the last four
digits of a credit card on file or your shopper pin for security
purposes.

If the office can assist you with further comments or concerns, let us
know.

I’m not sure why GoDaddy decided to can the premium auctions, but it’s possible the memership fees didn’t make up for lower bidding volume. As for why GoDaddy is offering me a $17.99 refund instead of the $19.99 I paid to join the program, it’s probably just a mistake.

OnlineCasino.de is poised to sell for 6 figures on Afternic.

OnlineCasino.de is currently in the closing soon section of Afternic with a top bid of $101,000. The domain has met its reserve. Although a bid doesn’t necessarily mean the sale will be completed, this price seems fair for this domain.

Afternic has a number of other good domains closing soon:
-CashAdvanceOnline.com $9,590
-WorldNewswire.com $3,000
-ImageUpload.com $2,500

Sedo is showing a recent sale of CityIndex.com for 75,000 Euro. It looks like this could be another great week for domain sales!

GoDaddy’s TDNAM premium auctions have disappeared. And so has GoDaddy’s support.

On August 11 I wrote about how GoDaddy was offering “premium auctions” on its TDNAM domain aftermarket. All of the domains in the premium category had traffic and most had starting bids around $10. In order to bid on premium domains you had to pay the $19.99 monthly fee to join at the premium level of GoDaddy’s domain parking service.

I paid the $19.99 so I could test drive the parking service and see how the premium auctions would pan out. I hoped to provide a review by the end of this month. But on Saturday the link to TDNAM’s premium auctions disappeared from its home page. You can still access the premium auctions list through the CashParking interface. But you won’t find any auctions:

Above: 0 search results for premium auctions at TDNAM.

So where have the premium auctions gone? I contacted GoDaddy via its online support to ask this simple question:

“Where are the premium auctions (for CashParking customers) for today?”

To my amazement, this question was apparently too difficult for GoDaddy to answer via e-mail. Here’s the response I received:

“Dear Andrew…

Mike P.”

For now I’d recommend not paying the $19.99 to join CashParking at the premium level. The main benefit of joining was bidding on premium auctions.

Oh yeah, and in case you were wondering, CashParking is a joke. But more on that later.

The domainer community was abuzz this week after Microsoft sued many individuals for registering domains with its trademark in them.

If you search on Google news for “microsoft domain name” you’ll find over 130 hits about Microsoft’s lawsuits that were announced this week. Instead of filing UDRP complaints to get back domains that include Microsoft trademarks, the company decided to sue under the 1999 Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act. This act allows for fines of up to $100,000 for cybersquatters.

By suing rather than just trying to get the names back, Microsoft has sent a clear signal to cybersquatters: don’t mess with our trademarks. This is much more efficient in the long run than going after each and every cybersquatter.

But I can’t help but think that Microsoft’s actions are misplaced. There are two types of Microsoft-related domains: those about its software (such as Office) and those about its services (such as Hotmail). I understand Microsoft trying to prevent squatting of domains related to services, but what do they hope to accomplish by going after its software-related domains? After all, it’s not like someone searching for Microsoft Office is going to land on a parking page and decide to purchase a “competing” productivity suite. Furthermore, many of these domains can be used by people providing supporting products and reviews of Microsoft’s software. Think about the possibilities for domains like “VistaPlugins”, “VistaReviews”, and “VistaWatch”.

There’s a hidden agenda underlying Microsoft’s actions. Microsoft wants to stomp out all typosquatting and cybersquatting, not just that of its trademarks. The company has taken proactive steps by launching its Strider TypoPatrol research and software.

Why is Microsoft at the forefront of this issue? Two reasons. First, the ad networks that benefit from a lot of this activity are Microsoft’s arch enemies Google and Yahoo. Microsoft has launched its own PPC ad network and wants to take a bite out of its competitors. Second, Microsoft benefits when someone enters a typo URL and the domain is not registered. If the web surfer is using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser and hasn’t added any plugins from competitors, entering a non-existent domain name leads surfers to MSN search results. Alongside those search results are MSN’s ads. In other words, the fewer domains actually registered the more traffic Microsoft gets.

An article in the September issue of Wired explores search spam and the role of .info domain names.

The article, titled “Spam + Blogs = Trouble” is a good overview of the problems of search spam, blog spam, and other various forms of web activity designed to take advantage of search engines. (The article will be online September 5, but you can read it on page 104 of the print edition that is available to subscribers now).

For those not versed in search spam, it’s basically creating multiple web sites, typically auto-generated by computers, to get good search rankings and then monetize the resulting search traffic through Adsense or affiliate programs. The article focuses much of its attention to splogs, or auto-generated blogs. It also talks about blog discussion and trackback spam. (I’m particularly familiar with discussion and trackback spam as it’s a constant problem on DomainNameWire. I have defeated much of the discussion spam using a CAPTCHA screener and am considering turning off trackbacks to eliminate the latter type of spam).

So what does this have to do with domains? According to the author, .info domains are the most used domains for splogs and search spam because they are typically the cheapest to register. If you’re going to generate hundreds or thousands of bogus web sites, would you rather spend a couple bucks per domain or $10? Do the math to understand the savings. Some registrars even give .info domains away free for a year. Most domains registered for splogging are not renewed. The article discusses giveaways that a site isn’t legitimate:

Another giveaway: Both [web site and the page it links to] had web addresses in the .info domain. Spammers flock to .info, which was created as an alternative to the crowded .com, because its domains are cheaper – registrars often let people use them gratis for the first year – which is helpful for those, like sploggers, who buy Internet addresses in bulk. Splogs so commonly have .info addresses that many experts simply assume all blogs [with .info domains] are fake.

It would be unfortunate for search engines to start discounting a site’s rank because of its domain extension. Especially a good, multi-purpose domains like .info. I’m a fan of .info domains, including my prized Blogs.info domain. But if the problem persists, you can bet that search engines will start changing their algorithms to hurt .info domains (if they haven’t already).

Although the article does a good job addressing web spam, the writer unfortunately confuses search spam with parked pages:

Sportals, as they are known, are Web pages consisting almost entirely of pay-per-click links, all of which shunt netsurfers to legitimate commercial Web sites, collecting money along the way for the spammers. Examples of these doorway pages include debts.com, lasvegasvacations.com, and 90210.com, all owned by industry pioneer Marchex of Seattle; another is photography.com, run by NameMedia, based in the Boston suburb of Waltham.

The author is confusing sportals with parked domains. A sportal is a computer-generated portal that typically uses content scraping to generate thousands of pages for search engine purposes. The examples the author gives are certainly enhanced parking pages, but certainly not sportals. (An example of sportal-generating software is Directory Generator).

Alas, there’s no easy or good solution to eliminating web spam. Let’s just hope sploggers don’t take the .info domain down with them.