I had a few minutes to spare at lunch and came across this article about CaliforniaClicks.info. I hate these types of sites and highly suggest you don’t take part in this type of activity, but that’s not what the article is about. The article went like this.
In May/June a direct competitor started Californiaclicks.com and used the Buxhost script for his website. This script has a really bad reputation as most Buxhost sites go scam and vanish after a short time.
This fact made me hope that I do not have to deal with this problem very long.
After about two weeks, my competitor pushed me from place 1 of the Google results for “CaliforniaClicks” and I got more and more emails from people complaining “Hey, I did join your site a week ago. Why does the site say now that my user name is unknown???”. Well, those people signed up with the .com site and not with mine *DUH!*I sent out newsletters that I am not affiliated with the site that has the .com domain and I tried even harder to get my site search engine optimized, although this really is a pain in the a$$ for (small) PTC sites.
In the middle of August I checked my competitor again and oh wonder: The website was offline.
I checked again at the end of August and the website was still offline. My CaliforniaClicks.info slowly managed to get rank 1 back on Google searches. That was the time when I knew I had one this battle.Today, I got an email from someone calling himself “Alexei” ([email protected]) with the following content:
“Preferred Domain Availability Notice:
californiaclicks.com will be listed for auction in a few days. This
domain might be useful for you, since you own a domain similar to this domain.
To express interest in owning this domain, fill out the simple form here:
californiaclicks.com [link removed]Sincerely,Alexei
330 Franklin Road #135A
Suite 186
Brentwood, TN 37027just out after copying it to Triond that there is no link to end the subscription anywhere in this email *lol*
Anyway, I laughed about it and checked the website out. The minimum bid should be $97 and that is crazy for a domain name that was active only 3 months and has a reputation as bad as it could be.
So I deleted this email.
Here’s what gets me. It just proves again that a dot com will beat out a dot info on Google with little to no effort. Fortunately for him the competitor folds and he can get the domain for a tiny sum of $100. A hundred dollars for a site he knows is superior to his. Evidently CaliforniaClicks isn’t making much money if he can’t pony up $100. Ohhh, the principal is what matters. That’s right. Cybersquatters suck. In that case I agree but money is money and if you have the chance to get the improved version of your domain for under $100 you better take it. If it’s not worth that much to you then your company/domain must not be very valuable.
I wish I could get back that 60 seconds of my life – site looks like it came out of 2001 era or older.
A friend has a business on a hyphenated .COM domain and recently the non-hyphenated version dropped. Unfortunately I was not aware until after the fact as a backorder at Snapnames would likely have prevented this scenario. Anyway, the new registrant is trying to sell the name for more than $1500. While my friend’s business sells a high-dollar product I somehow doubt he is going to pay any real amount of money for the domain.
When it comes to money I never assume I am smarter than the other guy. Who care if it is .com or .info or .xxx…..don’t worry about it when there is no money there. Just like stocks. If it won’t go up, don’t buy it. 🙂
“In that case I agree but money is money and if you have the chance to get the improved version of your domain for under $100 you better take it.”
Well said! That site is pretty tough to look at. I know of a few awards it could definitely be nominated for. 🙂
Would be hard to discern whether the .info was the reason he got outranked or the poor user experience the site delivers (popups? really?)