Starting a Small Home Business

Directories and Domain Parking – Where to Go From Here?

April 14th, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized — Small Home Business Author

As we stroll down the high street in todays gloomy world of enterprise we could all be forgiven for thinking “hey, this is a great location, I could turn this into a thriving business” and with store rental prices getting lower by the day the cost of entry would be peanuts. So you go to your realty agent and what do you know, there is a problem. Although the store is not being used, it is being squatted in by a mystery company. Strange you think, I’d love to take that shop and turn it into something this community really needs – instead it is going to sit here and rot. Leaving the community blemished by its unsightly condition.

Is this how we want the world to work?

It’s exactly how the internet works right now. Amazing isnt it. Have you ever looked for a new domain name? It’s a nightmare of chaos. We have 4 main types of domain user right now:

• legitimate business
• social networking
• family/individual
• domain squater

When you look for a new domain name you start to delve through swathes of domain names and permutations there of. As you wind your way through the quagmire something rapidly becomes obvious; most domains are either directories, or directories for domain squatters.

How can you tell the difference? Often a legitimate directory will look something like this pet directory where as a directory sat on a squatter domain will looksimilar to a directory,it willooze poordesign.While one serves a legitimate service to the world listing building companies the other provides irrelevant links in a terrible design. Where does the user fit into this? If the user gets no value from a page then why is it allowed to exist or the owner entrusted with the domain. Of course one mans joy is another mans poison but in this case it is not true. There is zero value from squatter domain other than a price tag for someone to pay to own it. Now ok you may say this is a form of business in itself – a notional value is attributed to the domain name and as such it now has a “worth”. Well, if the domain was a commodity then it would find it’s price and this is where the next part of this horrible puzzle fits in; domain tasting.

Domain tasting is the name attributed to the process of buying a domain to see if it gets traffic and is sellable without ever paying for it. A person takes ownership of a domain, puts it on a domain selling site with it’s nasty “directory” page on and waits 5-10 days to see what the traffic is like – or indeed whether they can sell it. If neither is good they will not pay for the domain, but let it drop again. This is hardly fair? How is anyone supposed to do business in this climate. What is the impact on legitimate directories? In 2007 there was a Google slap on many directories. It was postulated that this was due to people creating directories purely to get Google Backlinks – I believe it was because of an algorithm change to penalise domain squatters directories. I hope they rid the internet of this scourge and start to ensure that website provide real service to people including legitimate directories.

James Williams is a tech crazed guy who loves to write about tech. You can catch more of his knowledge and help on htc devices at htc rom.