Does the term “shadow registry” concern you? It should if you own a .gd domain name.

Over the past few years startups and tech darlings have increasingly embraced “cute” ccTLDs and domain hacks that include ccTLDs.

A key example is bitly.

Bitly, which created millions of shortened URLs at Bit.ly, found out that using a ccTLD is not necessarily the safest thing to do. .Ly is the country code for Libya. With everything that happened in Libya over the past couple years, there was significant risk with using a .ly domain name.

Sometimes it’s not political strife that should cause ccTLD owners to worry. It’s mismanagement.

ccTLDs aren’t operated with the same scrutiny as gTLDs. Consider .GD for Grenada, which has been in a state of flux for several months.

Grenada’s National Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has delegated the operation of .GD to KSregistry GmbH. KSregistry, a subsidiary of Key-Systems, was the technical backend for previous registry provider AdamsNames, so this should be an easy transition. Right?

Not necessarily. In KSregistry’s press release today, it states:

Discrepancies in the registration data may result from the operation of a shadow registry by a third party that had partial control of the .GD zone from March 8 to May 1, 2013. While the .GD zone is frozen, no registrations, modifications, transfers, deletions or renewals can be made until the zone file has been fully reviewed and confirmed as valid and complete…

Can you imagine if you were running a business on .gd? A bet you’d have a lot of sleepless nights.

Before starting a business on a ccTLD, business owners need to scrutinize its history and management. In the case of .gd, the technical provider is respected. The problem was on the management side.

Commercialized ccTLDs that have significant backing should be OK. Small, locally run ccTLDs deserve more scrutiny.

Get answers to your toughest country code domain questions.

Some country code domain names are fairly easy to register. Most of them aren’t.

Frankly, figuring out how to register some of the more obscure ccTLDs could take a Ph.D.

But now there’s a free resource for all of your ccTLD questions: Ask Alex.

It’s a new section on Tucows’ OpenSRS web site where company employee Alex Schwertner answers all of your questions about ccTLDs.

Residency requirements? What forms do I need to fax? What documents do I need to provide? You get the idea.

Tucows bolstered its ccTLD registration options when it acquired EPAG last year. Schwertner was an EPAG employee who now works for Tucows.

Ask Alex is a free resource and anyone can ask questions, whether you intend to register your domains through OpenSRS or another registrar.

ccTLDs, domain parking, and more make the top five list.

If August is over, why is it still 100 degrees in Austin? Sigh…

Here are the top 5 news stories from Domain Name Wire last month.

Oops, I entrusted my domain name to a tiny island nation! –
think about political and technical risks before setting up your web site on a country code domain name.

Wow: Craigslist loses Craigslists.com domain dispute – so this guy creates a list, and his name is supposedly Craig, and…it’s kind of a funny story.

Meet the woman who bought a domain name instead of a house – entrepreneur plunked down cash for Posse.com.

Sedo says domain parking continuing to decline, writes off EUR 57.1 million – increased competition is a key reason companies such as Sedo are seeing downward business pressure in domain parking.

Your domain names are worth less than you think – or, stop hating on other peoples’ domains and put your money where your mouth is.

Targeted a specific country? Get your ccTLD.

It’s no secret that Google uses several factors to determine where a web site is “located” and thus determine its relevance to each individual searcher. But there has been a lot of debate about which factors are most important.

The two I hear mostly commonly are if the domain has a particular country code domain name and where the web host is.

Now Google search-spam czar Matt Cutts has laid it out on the table.

One person asked a question that we forgot to make a video for: “Can you list in order of importance the things that make a site to be seen by google as a site from a particular country?” Since we didn’t make it as a video, here’s the answer as a quick bonus:
1. country code TLD (ccTLD) such as .de or .fr
2. geotargeting in the webmaster console
3. IP address

There may be other signals, but those are the biggies and the order that I’d put them in.

What those “other signals” are is unclear. Perhaps the whois information matters. But Cutt’s response verifies that the most important thing in determining what country your web site is in is the country code top level domain name. Many people also know that IDNs are good for targeted a specific language.

No surprise: .cn falls.

It should really come as no surprise. As I predicted a couple months ago, China’s crackdown on the .cn domain name has led to a precipitous drop in the number of registered .cn domain names.

Data from HosterStats.com shows that the registered base of .cn domain names has dropped 39% in the first four months of the year, from 13,459,133 at the end of 2009 to just 8,254,681 at the end of April 2010.

The drop is due to a number of changes by China in how the .cn domain is administered. Primarily this is a crackdown on ownership, requiring each registrant to provide significant documentation in order to retain their .cn domain. The domain was even shut to new registrations by non-Chinese registrars for awhile. The changes caused big registrars, including GoDaddy, to drop the domain.

Another factor leading to the decline is the end of promotional pricing. For a while .cn was available for 1 yuan. This low price led to a lot of the problems that caused China to crack down on how the domain was being used.

HosterStats.com points out that .Cn has now fallen to the third largest ccTLD behind .de and now .uk.