Many domainers know it, but I’m always surprised by how many don’t. Godaddy and some other registrars let you check how many Whois queries you had for your domain in a given period of time. I use Godaddy as my primary registrar because of these types of tools and use them weekly. It would not be a far stretch to say that the more people interested in who owns the domain, the more people interested in the domain. Take that a bit further and the more people interested in your domain, the more valuable your domain.
There are certainly other reasons for whois checks. If you have one for auction or just picked it up off a drop, you are going to have a much higher query rate. Here’s a list of some of the domains I have and the whois check for January.
FORTY.NET .net 48
ROBOTICPETS.COM .com 37
GGGJ.COM .com 32
SIYO.COM .com 32
DOMAINSHANE.COM .com 29
YESN.COM .com 26
CVIW.COM .com 22
FLANKED.COM .com 22
BGUM.COM .com 21
LAGI.COM .com 21
HIQO.COM .com 20
COMMODITYOPTIONS.NET 19
VBBB.COM .com 18
BESTIPHONEAPPS.NET 17
DDZS.COM 17
All the names that are in this group are decent names and/or are names that I use for blogs or email. Obviously my blog’s domain and my email get a lot of whois searches. This data is a very helpful tool in the fact that if a domain gets little to no whois interest, it tells me that nobody has any interest in that domain. I try a liquidate any names under 5 queries a month. It’s not a rule just a mental suggestion. I suggest you do the same for your domains. Do you really want to carry a domain that has no interest?
How do you check this in godaddy?
Go in to domain manager into the “Tools” section up in the left and select Create Export. Within that you can choose which type of data you want to export. Let me know if that is enough info
So true, I totally agree that a lot of domainers completely forget to account for the number of whois queries on their domain names.
I have an API query setup with my reseller account that allows me to fetch the number of whois queries for my set of domains names.
Cheers,
Geek
Dude…….i totally forgot about that. I had accessed this some time back and forgot about it. Thanks so much for letting me know again.
This is how to access who is searches for domains registered with godaddy.com
Log into your domain manager.
Up top you will see tools.
Click on tools
Click on exportable lists
Click on add export
Click next
Check off both whois reports on right \
Click Next
Name the file
Godaddy will email you when the file is ready is should take a few minutes or less
Repeat the above steps and you will see the file to download.
By the way the first guy I spoke to at Godaddy said it couldnt be done
awesome tool. Thanks a lot dude!
never knew about this.. killer suggestion..thanks Shane..
Hate to admit this, but I’ve been doing this for three years and did not know this tool was available at godaddy. Excellent post…. thanks.
can you do this type of whois querying on domains you do not own?
No. Only the names you own
Is there a option or any other service of that kind, that would give us statistics for much LONGER PERIOD?
Godaddy provides just a “month ago” stats, it would be nice if there was option for last year or even ALL TIME stats, beginning with date of registration of the domain!
Thanks,
Marko