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

[Frank Petronio]

I own my own domain in my name as a .com, as in frankpetronio.com. For a few years I also owned frankpetronio.net but I let my ownership expire last year because I had no real practical use for it.

I like to keep track of my search engine results since clients will find me that way, or maybe they will check me out? If I see anything negative I try to chase it down and remove/resolve it, seems like common sense and good business practice.

Checking my name with a search engine producing this interesting result - someone, obviously Chinese, purchased my .net domain and populated it with random popular clickable text links to other text based pages that look to be part of the same origin. By being so search engine friendly, this page now ranks higher than all but my primary website (Third out of hundreds of results!), yet the page has nothing about Frank Petronio in it, other than using my name in the text and code. I've translated it and it is all fake and pointing to other bogus pages generated on the fly. There is no real content or useful purpose.

What do you think this means? Is it some sort of scam that Chinese hackers will use to extort American businesses to resell them their alternative domain names back to them at inflated prices? Does it mean everyone with a business that wants good search engine results will have to preemptively buy every possible alternative .biz, .edu, .de, .ca... etc... hundreds of alternative suffixes?

Or is it even more devious than that, some sort of hacking bad guy activity? Or some new way to create spam, or perpetrate fraud?

Will ICANN or some authority put an end to this? Can they?

Will the search engines figure out how to filter these bogus sites out?

I'm not up on the tech, I am not sure of the reasons, the issues, or solutions but even if I did buy up my alt .net domain, what's to stop them from doing the same thing with some other suffix? So I buy back myname.net, they'll just buy another suffix and do the same thing all over again, right?

It's not a big issue but it is troublesome and annoying, and if I were a major web presence it would be a more serious matter. Even for the end user, they don't want bogus sites cluttering up their searches. What do you think will happen and is there anything at all I can do?

I've seen a lot of old domains go to China and sit unused, but I thought it was just speculation so they might sell some marketing name for a high price - remember domain name speculation was encouraged by GoDaddy and such. How much is it costing them to purchase millions of empty domains? I bet it's not $7.99 each.... How do they make any money from doing it, i.e. what is the business model?

[Brian C. Miller]

Major web presences buy up all of the alternate endings, mispellings, and assorted hyphenations. And they don't let them go, ever. You let yours go, and one of the bottom feeders picked it up, for a year. They can do this because it costs them pennies to register huge batches of names. It's the 21st century, after all. IIRC, somebody at Microsoft let the hotmail domain expire, and some nice guy picked it up, pointed the domain back at their servers so they didn't lose traffic, and dropped them a note.

Today that name would have wound up being owned in Russia or China.

BTW, the Chinese registrar's systems seem to be screwed up, because it currently returns a "1" for the entire page content. Just wait a year, and they'll drop it and you can pick it up again.

[Frank Petronio]

But how did that site rise in the rankings so highly if it doesn't have any real content?

And what is to keep them from just doing the same thing with .biz, .org, etc. until all the search results are bull$#it?

[Brian C. Miller]

This is one of the ways that the Google search rankings operate. Your name was found in a domain name, which counts very highly in the ranking scheme. Other ways to goose the Google rankings is have a lot of pages with your name, or other search term, which points back to your page as a source.

What is displayed on the Google page is translated as, "The main drift of the forefront of fashion nowadays which star is most popular, the most famous star. The star concerned about how the stars are fashionable, Ben Wang a clean sweep."

The text has NOTHING to do with you or your photography! It's all automated!

The way it works is that there is a registry of dumped domain names. The bottom feeders have scripts which automatically pick up these domain names and register them for a year. If you didn't also do .org, .tel, and all the rest, then of course the bottom feeders didn't pick those up, because you didn't register them, they didn't get dumped, and nobody's looking for them.

If you are paranoid about your page rankings, buy up all the domains, keep them forever, and then fill the alternates with content that mentions you and points back to your main page.

[Leigh]

Does it mean everyone with a business that wants good search engine results will have to preemptively buy every possible alternative .biz, .edu, .de, .ca... etc... hundreds of alternative suffixes?

Not Possible.

ICANN recently released control of top-level domains. Now you can use any combination of letters.
They also abandoned the use of the ASCII character set, allowing ISO characters and foreign alphabets in URLs.

In the past there was a limit on the maximum number of characters in the URL, which is why you have
shortened top-levels like .co.uk rather than .com.uk, but that limit no longer exists.

The number of domain names that include your name as the second-level is virtually infinite.

- Leigh

[Frank Petronio]

Ah got it, thanks. So once you buy a domain, you want to keep up with it... forever. Damn!

Oh well a few Chinese characters in my results looks cosmopolitan doesn't it? How Zen....

[jonreid]

They'll probably drop it after a year Frank. I'm sure Google could do something about this if they tried harder. It's obvious their algorithms can be tricked relatively easily as you've shown.

[patrickjames]

If it makes you feel any better Frank I doubt anyone that is interested in you will click on a Chinese link.

[Old-N-Feeble]

Yep... if you want to minimize that sort of thing you have to buy and keep all the possible (dot) domains. Not only that but all the possible variations such as frank-petronio and frank_petronio. Internet scam bastards that take advantage of honest folk really piss me off.

[SamReeves]

The dot net owned by the Chinese will probably turn into spyware links and shitty porn over a while. Yeeech.