Avoiding “Domain Tasters”

So I’ve heard of wine-tasting, but I’ve got to admit that “domain tasting” is a new one on me.

What is it? Simply put, “domain tasting” is the practice of registering domains and monitoring what kind of traffic they get. For those companies who make money buying and reselling domains, they use this practice to see what domain ideas get a lot of traffic. If they get a lot of hits on a certain domain, they’ll hold that particular domain in hopes that someone will approach them to purchase the domain or for the purposes of placing ads on the domain. If a domain is not getting a lot of traffic, they’ll simply return the domain within five days since many domain registration companies gives you a five day grace period in which you can “return” a domain name without charge.

So what does this mean to you? Well it may mean that when you’re researching domain names for your site, you can run the risk of losing that domain to someone practicing domain tasting if you’re not careful. This had actually happened to me about six months ago. I was doing some domain searches for a new web site was working on and found the perfect one that was available. But I didn’t have my payment information available, so I wasn’t able to snag that domain right then. When I went to register the domain the next day, I found that that was registered right after I had checked its availability, sending me back to the domain idea drawing board. About a week later, when I was searching for alternative domains, I decided to check out that lost domain and lo and behold it was available again. Needless to say, I was sure to snag that name immediately.

In that case I was lucky and I was able to get my domain in the end. But whenever you’re researching domain names, you may attract the attention of these “tasting” companies. Fortunately, there are some easy precautions you can take when doing your research. The following tips are from this post about domain tasting from the Daily Domainer.

1. Don’t do domain research unless you’re prepared to buy immediately. If you find that the perfect domain is available, snag it NOW.
2. If you’ve done a recent search and find that the domain that was available had been purchased when you to return to register it, wait for five days and check to see if it is available again. While you’re waiting, be sure not to search for that domain again. Remember that domain tasters are monitoring to see what kind of traffic a particular domain gets. Don’t encourage the taster to keep the domain by providing traffic.
3. Use the five-day grace period to your advantage. If you have several domains in mind register all of them at once and drop the ones you don’t want before the end of the five days. Just be sure that the registrar that you’re using allows this.Thanks to the Daily Blog Tips blog for this link!

Tagged as: domain name registration, domain names