Chinese bought my alternative domain and now they have very high search results !!!?

[Frank Petronio]

And don't forget the Pen Island site.

[Jason_1622]

I've had friends lose their domain names to unsavory folks before. Just be glad it is being used as an SEO farm and not a porn site!

[Steve Smith]

To be fair, you don't lose your domain name or have it stolen. You give it up by not paying for the renewal.


Steve.

[Leigh]

To be fair, you don't lose your domain name or have it stolen. You give it up by not paying for the renewal.

True. It used to be that domain names became available for issue immediately upon expiration.

Now there's a 30-day grace period for renewal, at least with some registrars. I don't know if that was mandated by ICANN or if some registrars just hold the names as a courtesy before identifying them as expired.

- Leigh

[Steve Smith]

Now there's a 30-day grace period for renewal, at least with some registrars.

That makes sense. I have a few domain names registered with 123reg. They usually send out 60 day and 30 day reminders. With one domain which I have they sent a one day reminder only and I first saw it three days later. They still accepted my payment for renewal though and I did not lose it.


Steve.

[Old-N-Feeble]

At my age and in my health... I don't need frustrating worrisome complications. I'll surf the web but will never be at it's mercy. I'll burn my PC first.

[Scott Knowles]

Two reasons I see, as noted. First, many Website hosts buy up temporary domain names for bulk e-mailings. They're entitled to use them for a year before they officially register them as permanent domains, or it become available again. This way they can simply cycle through the list and let the old ones die.

Second, anyone can reserve an existing domain or its variants by name or suffix, and they look for successful ones, like yours, and simply wait to see when it expires and grab it. They can also get the variants which they use for search engines to steer to other Websites. You can petition ICANN that the ones with your .net or .org are fulfilling the agreement for the use of the suffix, but that takes a lot of time and likely the other Website will disappear.

You should have gotten a notice from your domain name registration about the .net expiration date, but some don't and assume the domain name owner checks the registration. You should have access to the actual domain name registration host than a third party so you can update the information and renew the registration(s).

As for some domain name hosts, read the fine print when you get one, as they often register it in their name for you so you can't move it without buying it from them, and they keep it if you fail to pay the bill so they can resell it without having to change the registration.

As for your issue, have you contacted them to buy it back? Or put in the notice to buy it when it expires again?

[paulr]

The pictures are better at frankpetronio.com, but the writing is better at frankpetronio.net:

Introduction: What is the end of practice large breasts actress Yang Jinhua vindictive, how can the same time stimulated the ice soul and soul inflammation? Cold night laughed, thinking the the Oolong child reputation, but also help to melt plastic so a good sword out, even told his North the offerings Mogong no harm, the current sidewalk: "I by chance come into contact with the North offerings Mogong ... cold night just here, that Oolong

This is fabulous. Does anyone know what kinds of algorithms they use for cooking up this text? I'm smelling a poetry project.

[Brian C. Miller]

Paul, you are looking at the results of the Google translation algorithm. The text on the page is probably grabbed randomly from various Chinese sites, and posted on the page. Then we happen along, and post the results into the Google translator.

The interesting part is translating that into photography. Pixies. I smell pixies, and they ain't from Disney...

[polyglot]

There are a couple of things going on here:
- frankpetronio gets good search rankings because of Frank's own website, so it makes a good place to put a link-farm site to generate revenue from ads
- they can drive search relevance up even higher by linking to it from their other link-farm sites
- once there is a little traffic on it, it can be revenue-positive from ads pretty easily. At that point, the domain can be sold to another spammer or link-farmer, or maybe back to the original owner

To get an idea of how easy this is, google for "domain tasting" sometime. Basically the registrars are generous enough to spammers (they want to sell lots of domains, after all) that they will hand over a domain for 3 days for no fee in which time the link-farmer can test the domain out and see if it's natively getting traffic, e.g. a popular domain for which the registration has lapsed or something that receives URL-typos from a popular domain. If it receives traffic, they keep it and build their link-farm out to it; if it doesn't receive traffic then they give the domain back to the registrar. Now imagine doing that with an automated process with several million domains at once and you realise they have a risk-free way to sift for spam-valuable domains and monetise them.