Know Your Enemies
Tags: Business Development
As of 20 minutes ago, a new client of mine was on track to get a brand spanking new site that I built with the preferred domain name of their choice. Now, as fate would have it, their own past has come back to haunt them and royally screw the project 7 ways to Sunday.
This client has never had a website before, and subsequently, the previous owners had registered the best domain name for the company close to 7 years ago. She contacted them about the domain name and they agreed to release it. 3 days passed and nothing more came of it. She contacted them back to find the previous owner telling her that he has no idea who registered it and he has no idea how to get control of it. She tried her best to work it out with them to release it and give me admin access so I can point it over to where their new site will be hosted, but these folks just aren’t cooperating on it. It’s a bummer, but life goes on.
So we opted for the next best thing, which is the company name followed by the state (hawaii) as the domain. Within a few hours of this decision on Friday morning, she had mentioned it to several people that work for the company, and now those loose lips are sinking the ship. At 9:30 this past Sunday morning, someone registered the domain name we were about to go with. We just got screwed. Again.
Now I’m in a frantic rush to figure out an easy-to-remember alternative until the original domain name becomes available next month. A part of me wants to tell the client we should just hold out until next month and we’ll just grab the better domain and go live at that point. Either way, I’ve learned something here.
The Real Lesson
The importance of qualifying your clients for more than just financial security and reliability is very real. If this is a company that has enemies or tainted employees, then you could be dealing with a time bomb that you as the SEO or webmaster have to deal with later on. I guess I could count my blessings and be grateful that it’s happening now in the midst of development instead of after the site is public.
Either way, this sucks.
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December 18th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
Always get the domain name first :-). Get all possibilities, if you are still deciding. Getting an available name is just a few dollars.
One of the problems is that there are a few registrars or whois-lookup sites that sniff your lookups and run off to register them (usually automatically, usually just for domain tasting). See http://frankschilling.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/10/domain-tasting-.html . If it is by a registrar & for tasting, you’ll likely be able to grab the name after a week.
Another possibility would be to check the domain auctions or aftermarket sites for a really good name.
December 19th, 2007 at 11:09 pm
I agree with John. I doubt it was one of his friends or employees.
I hate to drop links into blog comments because they get stuck in moderation so just do a search for “stealing domain name research” & “Domain Name Front Running” & “Whois Hijacking My Domain Research?”
If you do your domain research in the wrong places or use the wrong tools, people receive a feed of all the research and buy the domain names if you don’t immediately registrar them. It’s sometimes called Domain Name Front Running. It is a practice of stealing someone’s domain name search queries and registering the domain name before the original person can register it.
Things to avoid:
* Address bar guessing.
* Search engines that don’t make a billion dollars a year in revenue.
* Browser plug-ins that send data back to the Internet.
* Client software.
* 3rd Party WHOIS query portals.
* Unauthorized executables.
* DNS operators.
* Registrars (and resellers).
* Name Spinners.
* Registries.
* Ad-Ware.
* Spy-Ware.
Go directly to trusted registrars and whois companies.
Check again after 5 days or so.
December 20th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Well we’re both wrong and right to a certain degree. It’s been confirmed that it was a previous employee that milked it out a current employee. And trust me, there was no way that this domain could have been accidentally bought considering how unique the spelling is for the company name.
I do my domain research at one&one.com. Their phone customer service sucks, but they do have good prices lol.