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As the first ‘official’ post of my new website reidyokoyama.com, I thought I would kick things off with a little analysis of the the ordeals I went through to register this site. Registering my own domain of my likeness has always been something I’ve wanted to do and finally after a little bit of inspiration from some coworkers and some free time, here we are at reidyokoyama.com, up and running.

Unfortunately, getting this domain registered was not a walk in the park, which I initially assumed. I mean, I’m pretty sure I am the only Reid Yokoyama in the entire world. So when I went to check if reidyokoyama.com was available for registration, everything was a-ok. “Great,” I thought, “I’ll register it this evening.” The next time I check – “WE’RE SORRY, REIDYOKOYAMA.COM IS UNAVILABLE.”

Within 5 hours, someone had registered my domain? But, who? And, how??? I load reidyokoyama.com in my browser and I find a page that looks like this:

I’ve seen this template a few times, particularly when I misspelled a common website in my browser. I’ve been the victim of domain parking, which Wikipedia defines as “advertising practice used primarily by domain name registrars and internet advertising publishers to monetize type-in traffic visiting an under-developed domain name. The domain name will usually resolve to a page containing advertising listings and links. These links will be targeted to the predicted interests of the visitor and may change dynamically based on the results that visitors click on.”

I found it somewhat amusing that some of the predicted keywords for the domain included “Reid furniture” and “Cephe.” But more importantly, I wanted my domain name and wanted to know who purchased it.

I checked the WHOIS records on the domain and found the following:

So ‘MetaPredict’ had registered the domain, and looking at the time stamp, it was literally minutes after I had checked its availability. I searched on Google for [metapredict] and lo and behold, there’s a website called metapredict.com. They call themselves a “next generation domain registrar.” But there’s no further information on their site and how they operate. Going back to my Google search, a thorough blog post from Pocket SEO appears to explain what happened. Entitled, “Is Spyware Stealing Your Domain Names?” the author recounts how a friend of his wanted to register a domain under her likeness and when she checked later on that evening, found that it was scooped up by Meta Predict. And reading through the numerous comments, it sounds like many others have experienced the same thing.

So why does Meta Predict engage in such low-ball activities? The basis is a loophole in domain registration rules whereby there is a five day “grace period” from the day you register a domain to return it, free of charge. It’s called “domain tasting,” and a company like Meta Predict can bulk register a ton of domains, see which ones are getting traffic and return the sites that don’t, without cost. And for those five days that their parked page is on the site, they can generate and keep any money they get in PPC clicks, even if they return the domain. If it’s a site like mine, maybe they could get 1 or 2 clicks in a day, but when you have about 500,000 websites registered, the money can add up quite quickly.

How Meta Predict figures out what domains to register is the tricky part and I unfortunately don’t have a clear answer. One clue is that after this initial five day period, I went to Bluehost.com to register my website. I checked and it was available! Unfortunately, I forgot that I wanted to register via my friend Wysz’s domain, so he could get some commission for referring me. I went to his website, clicked his Bluehost link, checked the domain’s availability and WTF, Meta Predict has registered my domain! They had done it within a minute!

I think there are two ways they can do such scummy tactics:

1) Spyware – I’m using a MacBook Pro and while virus protection is great, I have an inkling that there’s some amount of spyware on my computer, one of which might be tracking what I type into the address bar.

2) Scraping domain checks from hosts - It’s hard to say if Bluehost.com is in-cahoots with Meta Predict, but the fact that they can register my domain within a minute after I check it’s availability is really alarming. Some of the comments left on Pocket SEO’s blog post indicate that the same this has occurred using GoDaddy as well. While I don’t have concrete evidence of either example, I really am left to wonder.

In the end, I was able to register my domain and all is good in the world. But, so long as this domain tasting can exist and Meta Predict stays in business, my tip to you is this: if you want to register a new domain, only check its availability when you want to purchase it! Otherwise, it could be gone, which is definitely embarrassing when you’re building a website for a client.

Luckily, there’s some action being taken on domain tasting by ICANN. In a press release, ICANN is proposing to levy a small charge on return domains within the five day window would effectively close the loophole that I fell victim to. The article noted that “In January 2007 the top 10 domain tasters accounted for 95% of all deleted .com and .net domain names — or 45,450,897 domain names out of 47,824,131 total deletes.”

That’s an alarming figure; and while I am all for net neutrality, these tasters need to be shut down.