Zombies best know quality is their ability to come back from the dead with less than desirable consequences for those they come in contact with.
But what do zombies have to do with domain names?
Yesterday was Sunday. But sometimes the call of duty is too strong to ignore despite the day of the week or the hour of the day. If you are involved in web development, you know the drill.
The Internet emergency – I’ve dealt with a lot of them over the years and there one thing I can say for them – they are never boring.
So that brings me to an email I received Sunday morning from one of my most loyal clients. This client has a links page, nothing fancy, just a list of links that may interest visitors to her website.
One of those links was to the website of two women, decorating mavens and sellers of “shabby chic” merchandise. Sometime recently, this website apparently went out of business. Want to guess what happened?
The domain is now parked with Sedo domain parking. Here is a quote from Sedo’s website. “Domain Parking is simple way to earn money from your domains’ natural traffic. If you have registered domain names, but they are not currently being used, then domain parking is a great way to put those domains to work, earning you revenue. You can make money without even lifting a finger! The idle domain is used to display relevant advertisements – every time a consumer clicks on one of the advertisements, you earn money.”
OK, sounds good, sign me up, right? Money for nuthin’. What could possibly go wrong with that. Well, if the domain you parked was “twoshabbychicks.com”, what do you think could go wrong. Maybe the parking domain company’s algorithm would put porn sites on the links that appear when you type in the domain?
Well, for more than one former customer of twoshabbychicks.com, revisiting their old site was an eye-opener, luckily not literally.
Here is the description of the “two shabby chicks” from another website that links to them, “Let Sanya & Ronda help you decorate your home! Sanya likes anything pink, her favorite look is romantic cottage, and she loves vintage floral fabric. Ronda’s passion is barn red, her favorite look is French country, and toile fabric tickles her fancy. When they put their decorating tastes together, there seems to be nothing missing. What they have created is a shopping paradise for those “chicks” that are searching for the perfect “shabby” accessory.”
I am willing to bet that not many of the “two shabby chicks” former customers are in the market for porn, “Well I came for that distressed enamel ware, but while I here – well, I ‘ll leave that to your imagination. I am guessing that not a lot of clicks are generated here.
I guess the point here is that your domain name is associated with you for long after you stop using it. Hey, that’s the point, right? You’ve built traffic for your site and now that you are not using the domain it might as well still bring in a little lunch money.
It is well worth remembering that your unused or expired domain name could come back to life with potentially embarrassing results, like those zombies we mentioned earlier. I am assuming that Sanya and Ronda wouldn’t be any happier with the current associations with their domain name. They may be even less happy than their former customers.
[tags]domain name, two shabby chicks, porn, domain parking, zombie[/tags]
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