I was looking through some upcoming NameJet dropping domain auctions via FreshDrop, and I noticed something that I found to be appalling. Hosting companies either dropping the ball on renewals or not doing enough to help their current or former customers with their domain name assets.

I generally do a historical Whois search for domain names I might have an interest in bidding on at auction. From this, I can see who previously owned it and try to figure out why they either didn’t find the domain name valuable enough to keep or why the domain name may have been allowed to expire.

On four consecutive searches today, I saw that the previous registrant email was a hosting company. What this means to me is that the hosting company didn’t pay the renewal bill either because they didn’t realize it needed to be renewed, their client no longer works with the company, or, probably the least likely of the bunch, the client no longer wanted the domain name.

Since these were very good domain names I searched, it’s unlikely that the client simply opted to not renew the domain name. Another unlikely thing is that the hosting company dropped the ball. I presume they manage other domain names and they would certainly get emails, so it’s unlikely they simply forgot because there would be some severe liability for that I would think.

What is likely in my opinion is that the client no longer works with the hosting company, and the hosting company didn’t feel compelled to let the client know their domain name was going to expire. They probably just didn’t feel like going through the effort of ensuring a safe transfer. Instead, since they didn’t have orders to renew the domain name, and since they wouldn’t be compensated for renewing it without those orders, they took the easy way out and just let the domain names expire.

Of course it’s the client’s job to keep tabs on its assets. However, I think it’s irresponsible or a hosting company to register a domain name on behalf of a client and keep the Whois information in the name of the company – specifically the registrant email where renewal notices are sent. If a relationship ends, the hosting company shouldn’t have to pay for a former client’s renewals, but the responsibility shouldn’t become theirs either.

I just noticed something within my domain account at Moniker that I want to share with you.  On domain names that I transferred into Moniker from other domain registrars, the auto-renew function was set to “off.”  Since most domain names I transfer in to Moniker are aftermarket acquisitions, these are important names that shouldn’t be dropped by me and should be set to auto-renew prior to expiration.

Although I monitor the weekly “expiring domains” email that Moniker sends, I think it’s better to be proactive about domain renewal status than to be reactive. Keep your better domain names on auto-renew to avoid any oversights. My other advice is to renew your key domain names for multiple years in the event of a credit card expiration or some other system error.

It’s better to be overly cautious than to make a regretful mistake.

When you have a developed website and are looking for ways to grow your traffic and rankings, redirecting (via 301 redirect) related, expired domain names is a good way to do it. On Lowell.com, I had a difficult time getting inbound links from the city websites and local organizations, as many of them work closely with the city of Lowell. I get frequent compliments and submitted press releases from many of them, so I know they like the site, but getting returned links has been a difficult task.

Needless to say, there are many small organizations and/or Festivals in the city. Some of the Festival organizers have websites that for whatever reason have been neglected. On occasion, they even let these domain names expire, which isn’t a surprise since these have generally not been updated in a while. Oftentimes, these websites have links from businesses, cultural organizations, and government websites in the area (not all .gov though). Most are links without anchor text, so the SEO value is very little, but that isn’t entirely the point.

Instead of letting someone else grab them and park them for the small amount of traffic they receive, I bought a couple and forwarded them to the correct event pages on my website, which contains information about the event history and dates. If/when people type these domain names-in or click on a link, they will get the information they looked to find. Most visitors probably won’t even notice the difference because they simply wanted to learn about the event, and that’s what I am doing. An example was a recent ethnic Festival, and I received about 20 visits from one website that had a link to the old site.

Ironically, the minor league hockey team operates on LowellDevilsHockey.com and LowellDevils.com dropped very recently. I was debating whether to buy it or not and opted against it. I informed all of the executives about the pending drop auction, and their marketing person told me they don’t need the domain name. I opted not to buy this one, as I didn’t want to have to deal with a professional sports organization asking why I own this name, while not understanding how I ended up with it.

The key is to pick and choose which names are worth buying and which could be infringing. Most of the Festivals have generic names, and if the Festival founders ever want the names back, I am more than happy to oblige. However, the hockey team name wasn’t close to being generic in my opinion and wasn’t worth any type of legal trouble. There’s a fine line between being helpful and being harmful, and I didn’t want to be perceived as being harmful.

If you operate websites, you can find expiring domain names that might help build awareness of your site and perhaps even add some SEO value. I want to give a tip of the hat to a friend who is a great SEO for this advice a while ago.

A few people have asked today – and the answer is yes, my blog has a new header. I didn’t think the old header was utilizing its space as well as possible, and the new header allowed me to easily add two new sections – a Domain Names for Sale section and an Expiring Domain Names section, which are both self-explanatory.

I haven’t decided whether I am going to accept outside submissions for the sale section yet. As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like brokering domain names for others and only do so on rare occasions. If the demand is there, I may begin accepting domain name listings.

My designer was able to make a couple of enhancements to the structure of the blog as well, which will help with search engine optimization (I hope). Literally a half hour after he made a couple of changes to the site structure, I received a Google Alert with about 10 posts that had just been indexed from months ago. I don’t know if it was coincidental or if the change had anything to do with the indexing, but either way, it is going to help in the long-run.

As always, if you have any suggestions, please drop me a note and I will see what I can do.