Think twice before you let those domains lapse

In an effort to shed time-sucking side projects in the past couple years I’ve let a number of sites go dark and domain names lapse. Some of these were ideas that never got off the ground, but one or two were sites with real traffic and Google pagerank (PR 5 in one case, not stellar but not achievable overnight either).

Sadly, some of these domains have now been taken over by those useless squatter pages that manufacture lists of “related links” and “popular searches” and so on to trick people into clicking on ads. This only makes sense – if you were a domain squatter, you’d certainly prioritize grabbing expired domains with high pagerank and many existing inbound links. If you set up your server never to return a 404, some of those linking sites might never even notice the change.

While I don’t regret the move toward simplifying my life, in one or two cases I wish I had just spent $8/year to keep the domain going for a year or two, redirecting traffic to one of my own sites. This would be a better service to former readers and linkers, and it would eliminate that queasy sensation I get every time I visit one of those old domains by accident.

(How big a role the registrars themselves play in this phenomenon is a question I’m interested in, but that research will have to wait for another day.)

Fazal Majid commented on Mon Sep 25 15:31:34 2006:

Another related issue is RSS/Atom feeds. If people subscribed to feeds on those lapsed domains, they are now vulnerable to spam through the aggregator. Of course, ubsubscribe is just one click away, but it will leave a bad taste in their mouth and damage the original domain owner’s reputation.

I often wonder what happens if (when?) one of the many Web-2.0 feed distribution companies like Feedburner flames out and has its domains taken over by spammers. I have 17 subscribed feeds served by Feedburner, that’s many unsubscribe links to click on (and to find updated feed URLs for).

Bob Gregory commented on Tue Sep 26 12:08:01 2006:

Discovering that your domain of useful tools had expired was a little like losing a favorite pet. Inconvenient, but not life shattering. And it will be mourned only until a replacement is found. Nice to have around. I’ll miss it.

Paul commented on Tue Sep 26 12:13:46 2006:

Actually, that one (I gather you’re talking about toolbot.com and were delicately omitting the name to avoid perpetuating the problem I’m talking about) should be back shortly – just a snafu with Dotster. (Renewal via Paypal payments is badly broken when using Safari.)

Thanks for the kind words!

Bob Gregory commented on Tue Sep 26 16:35:34 2006:

That’s good news (like someone calling to say they’ve found my lost dog :-).

It wasn’t clear whether you were also referring to Toolbot. Tracking you down was a challenge until it occurred to me to google “about.toolbot” and view the cached page. That led here, to a post about expired domains, so I assumed it meant Toolbot. I’m happy to be wrong this time :-)