What the heck are these people thinking!

[hallsofvallhalla]

https://www.battlechat.com/

https://www.refreshingnames.com/

[Jackolantern]

Honestly I think the domain squatter community is still struggling to catch-up to the way the world works now. I was actually just thinking about this earlier today.

Back in the day, maybe say from 1993 to about 2000, a majority of people getting on the Web had no idea how to get around or find anything. The archaic "search engines" back then did not help. This meant that if your mom got online and wanted to buy shoes, she was most likely to simply try typing in buyshoes.com or shoes.come and see where that took her. She didn't know any other way to find things. This made owning simple and common dictionary domain names very powerful. You could potentially get hundreds of thousands of interested visitors simple by owning shoes.com.

Of course this caused the explosion of domain squatters that really started taking off in the late 90's. Suddenly almost every combination of English words had been snapped up by someone. And fairly common word domains could go into the tens of thousands of dollars. If even one sold, it would pay for years of domain fees for hundreds of sites.

This as well as the creation of true search engines such as Google turned the business world away from simple, dictionary domain names to more unique, protectable and most importantly, unused names.

But these domain squatters still own the majority of domain names that are now extremely unlikely to ever sell for the rates that they are asking. But still they persist because, again, just one makes the whole past several years worth it. Kind of sad, really.

[vitinho444]

Yeah it's sad, but I agree with you, with good SEO it becomes obsolete to own such domain. Everyone uses "Google it" expression so I doubt anyone (unless REALLY day 0 beginners) try the "buyshoes.com" stuff.

[hallsofvallhalla]

Here is a great example of using SEO to get around not owning the original site
http://nissan.com/

https://www.nissanusa.com/

Nissan doesn't own Nissan.com but yet all roads lead to their website.

[vitinho444]

Exactly nice one Nissan!

Screw those domain squatters!

[hallsofvallhalla]

The crazy thing is I bet Nissan offered these guys million so for it and these guys are acting like victims.

[Jackolantern]

Here is a great example of using SEO to get around not owning the original site
http://nissan.com/

https://www.nissanusa.com/

Nissan doesn't own Nissan.com but yet all roads lead to their website.

Yep! And not even just SEO, but Google themselves make sure that all roads lead to nissanusa.com because the official site is going to have orders of magnitude larger organic footprint than the squatter site.

I remember something like this with mtv.com as well. For years MTV's official website was mtv-channel.com or something like that because someone was holding mtv.com ransom. I think they did eventually get it because I believe they are now at mtv.com, but I am not sure if they eventually paid for or sued for it.

Now ICANN has instituted policies that can allow a rightful owner to take the domain from a squatter. Nissan could probably file with them to have nissan.com rescinded from its current owner because it does not appear like it is really being used for anything. I think that is the main factor: is the squatter site doing anything of value with the page? For a while they were putting these stupid ad-covered pop-up sites on their squatted domains to try to appear like it is being used for something (we have all seen these sites: they do nothing but give a bunch of links and are covered with ads; most of us know the domain is simply being squatted when we see that). But ICANN has gotten onto that as well now.