Domain Magnate

Best deal you’ll find this year! In light of the recent SOPA controversy many registrars are now offering discounts for domain transfers. Ok, to be fair there is no controversy – SOPA is bad, very bad, for the whole Internet, except GoDaddy, who helped write it and are now paying the price as customers are leaving.  SOPA threatens the freedom of the Internet and if passed will allow copyright holders to have sites taken down by a quick order of a judge, without any representation or court.  More bad news is that it’s likely to pass due to wide spread support in the Congress.

There is some good news however. Many registrars are trying to capitalize on the wave of hate towards GoDaddy that this has sprung and provide large discounts for domain transfers:

Name.com $6.65 –  code ‘NODADDY’

NameCheap $6.99 + $0.18 –  code ‘SOPASucks’

DynaDot $6.99 – code ‘TEAMDYNADOT’

Note that these are mostly for .com transfers and expire on Dec 31, so hurry up!

Name.com also have more information on SOPA and their position on it

Here are further details as promised for attendants of my SEO workshop today at Gvahim, TelAviv.

These are the links to online tools mentioned in the presentation.

Keyword research tools: G keyword tool, G insights, WordTracker; G analytics

Advanced keyword research: SemRush.com, KeywordSpy.com, MarketSamurai.com

Backlink Checker tools: BacklinkWatch.com, OpenSiteExplorer.org

More Link Tools: Majesticseo.com, Ahrefs.com, Alexa

Bonus Site tools* (weren’t included in the workshop): Push2check.com, SpyOnWeb.com

SEO Browser extensions for chrome: SEO Site Tools, SEOQuake

Sitting kills linkbait example

Social Media and Reputation Management tools: Klout.com, Trackur.com; Google.com/alerts, SocialMention.com

Lately I’ve noticed several interesting site sales on DP and all had the same in common:

- sellers were very eager to sell their sites quick and asked for quick offers
- sellers provided only partial and outdated stats data
- all looked like very good deals

Many of the deals were quite enticing and the stats and data seemed realistic enough, so I dug deeper and as expected they were all scams, but following a very interesting pattern.

The scammers tried to “sell” sites that were previously listed for sale on flippa, so they used the screenshots and data posted by the actual owners on flippa at the time of the auction. Some of these were still active, some ended unsold. After an auction ends on flippa the screenshots are no longer visible. It’s also fairly easy to make similar, “updated”, fake screenshots having the original.

This is not a “grey” type of scam where site owners would slightly exaggerate their stats, round it up, or even show fake screenshots. The scammers didn’t own any sites and those who fell victim and sent them the cash through paypal quickly to buy it never got anything in return.

How can you spot a scam like that?

1. First and foremost a quick google search for the site will show if there was a flippa auction or if it was for sale anywhere else before so that the scammer could gather the data from there.
2. Request the scammer to prove ownership by inserting some unique text in the site  code – this is the easiest way to prove he actually owns the site.
3. Further background checks on the seller, his forum/email/messenger ids will frequently reveal any previous misdoings.

Stay safe, don’t rush and do proper due diligence before any purchase!