Email Alerts for Expiring Domains

Posted on January 31, 2012 by admin

Generic Domain Finder has a new feature that makes it easier to keep track of the expiring domain names that you want to track and register. Now, while you’re reviewing lists of Godaddy Expiring Domain Auctions, NameJet PreRelease names, and pending delete names, you can easily save the names to your account, and get an email update on the day that you need to take action. Here’s how it works:

First, create a free account, and sign in with that account. You need to create an account so that we know what email address to send the email alerts to.

Generic Domain Finder login and sign up area

Next, while you are browsing the lists of expiring domain name listings, you’ll notice a small letter icon next to the domain name. Click the icon of any name that you want to track.

click here to save the domain name listing to your account

The icon will turn green to let you know that the listing has been saved to your account.

mail icon turns green to indicate success

The day that the listing expires, you’ll receive an email that shows all of the names that you need to take action on. For PreRelease names, this means placing a backorder at NameJet. For GoDaddy, that means placing a bid at or near the time that the listing expires, and for pending delete names, that means either placing a back order at the major drop catching services (such as NameJet, Pool, or Snapnames), or attempting to drop catch the name yourself.

sample email alert of expiring domain names from Generic Domain Finder

Whatever the name you’re after, we hope that Generic Domain Finder helps you to enjoy more success in your domaining efforts!

New Dropped Domains List

Posted on January 11, 2012 by admin

We’re pleased to announce a new feature to the Generic Domain Finder website – a list of the best dropped domains.

Starting in 2012, we’ve been tracking all of the best pending delete domain names. Once they drop, some of the best names get snapped up immediately by drop catchers. However, there are still some good names that don’t get registered immediately. This represents a good opportunity for domainers who take the time to sort through the list to find meaningful, keyword rich generic domains.

The list only contains names initially detected by Generic Domain Finder to have the properties of a generic domain. This means that out of the list of 70,000+ domains that delete every day, we’re only tracking about 3,000. So, these domains have a much better likelihood of being valuable. Forget about endless pages of 000hotsuffhere.biz. You won’t find crappy domains like that in our lists.

We track all domains, registered and unregistered. If you’re only interested in seeing domains that weren’t registered, open the filter options, and select ‘NO’ for ‘Was Re-registered?’.

Dropped Domains Tracker - Filter

We update the list on a daily basis to check if any of the domains have been registered, so you don’t waste your time looking through lists of unavailable domains.

The dropped domain tracker is a free service from Generic Domain Finder. The available domain names are linked directly to GoDaddy for easy and quick registration. As always, leave us a comment if you have any feedback.

A Guide to Buying Expired Domain Names with NameJet (and SnapNames)

Posted on January 9, 2012 by admin

It’s not easy buying a great domain name these days. Because it’s so cheap to buy a domain name, and the also because domain names can make great investments, many domain names have already been registered.

When you shop through the various expiring domain name markets, you can sometimes find great deals that would otherwise be impossible to register freely. Perhaps the owner of a domain name gave up on a project that they registered a domain name for. Perhaps the credit card they used for their registrar expired, and their renewal reminder emails all went into their spam email folder. There can be lots of reasons why someone let a domain name registration lapse.

This guide will explain some of the different markets that exist for buying expired domain names, and give a quick analysis of the quality of the domain names available there.

PreRelease Domain Names

A few days after the expiration date of a domain name, it will end up being listed as a PreRelease domain name. The domain name comes back into the control of the original registrar of the domain. The name servers for the domain are updated and the domain name will usually redirect to a page full of advertisements, with a message that the domain name has expired.

PreRelease domain names end up getting listed a couple of auction services. The biggest and most important of these auction services are NameJet and SnapNames. SnapNames and NameJet have partnerships with different registrars, for the right to auction off their expired domain names.

Generic Domain Finder has a free list of PreRelease Domain Names, to help you find the best names to backorder.

The auction process for these PreRelease domain names works like this. Buyers can scan through lists of domain names that have expired. If they find a name they are interested in, they can place a backorder request for the domain name. At the end of the listing period (usually 3 to 4 weeks), a few different things might happen:

If there is only 1 backorder for the domain, the person who backordered the domain will automatically win the auction. They will pay the backorder service charge, usually $69, and after some time, will own the domain.
If there is more than 1 backorder for the domain, an auction will be held between everyone who placed a backorder request. At the end of the auction, the highest bidder will win the auction. They will pay whatever the final price is to the auction house, and after some time,will own the domain.
If there were no backorders for the domain, it will enter the redemption period. In the redemption period, which is about 30 to 40 days, the original owner of the domain can still get it back by paying a high service fee – usually about $250 or so. However, most domain name owners usually don’t renew domain names during the redemption period. If they’ve gone this long without noticing the domain name expired (at least 30 days), it probably wasn’t very important to them. After the redemption period, the next opportunity for expired domain buyers comes along, which is called Pending Delete.

Pending Delete Names

Pending Delete is the name of the 5 days period, right before the record of the domain name is deleted. From the moment that the domain is deleted from the registry, it’s free for anyone else to register for the price of a regular domain name registration. There are a few different opportunities for a domain buyer here, and it’s important to understand your options in order to get the best deal.

Generic Domain Finder has a free list of Pending Delete Domain Names, to help you find the best names to drop catch.

First of all, SnapNames and NameJet have a service of drop catching domain names. For $69, they will try to catch a name as soon as it expires and assign it to you. For the good names that have made it this far, you can expect that it’s going to be quite competitive, with many buyers trying to register the same name at the same time.

Since NameJet and SnapNames have quite a bit of technology and experience for catching dropping domain names they usually win the names that they go after on behalf of their customers. So, if there’s a name on the pending delete list that you really like, your best bet is to place an order with NameJet and let them drop catch it for you.

If there are other bids for the same name, then once they catch the name, they will send it to an auction. The highest bidder will win the domain.

If you don’t want to pay $69 for the service of having one of the professionals catch the name for you, you could try to catch it yourself. There are a few drop catching scripts you can buy that can help you increase your chances. Every day, you add the list of names you want to catch into the software, and they continuously check to see if the domain you want has dropped. If it did drop, and it wasn’t registered yet by another drop catcher, it will attempt to register it for you.

One such drop catching script is called Snatcher. Currently it works with Dynadot. You prepay credits into your Dynadot account so that it can automatically register names for you as they become available.

Dropped Domains

Finally, you can just pick through the list of names that dropped that were not registered. Obviously the best names are long gone by this point, but you can still find some good names worth registering at this point. As a rough estimate, somewhere between 80 to 90% of the names that expire every day will be available to register uncompetitively. By keeping an eye on the list of recently dropped domains, you can pick up some great domains for just the cost of a registration fee.

Generic Domain Finder has a free list of Dropped Domain Names, to help you find the best unregistered names that have recently dropped.

GoDaddy Expiring Domains and NameJet PreRelease Filtered Lists Are Now Available

Posted on December 26, 2011 by admin

We’ve just published a new feature on Generic Domain Finder – filtered lists of expiring domain names from GoDaddy and NameJet PreRelease auctions.

As a domainer, it’s always been a struggle to keep up with the vast number of domains that expire every single day. It’s possible to spend countless hours a day sifting through the tens of thousands of domains that expire daily. It’s also a mind numbing process, as many of the domains are truly worthless.

At Generic Domain Finder, we realized this was a problem in need of a solution. We’ve developed a special high speed version of our domain appraisal technology to identify domain names containing keywords that are commonly searched. This includes a system to identify keywords embedded in domain names. Next, we check to see whether or not those keywords have any interest from advertisers or not. Finally, we check the actual properties of the domain, such as the extension (COM, NET, and ORG for now), the length, the number of words, etc to come up with a best guess of it’s estimated value.

We hope this will become a valuable tool for domainers are serious about building a strong portfolio of generic domains.

In addition to pre-filtering the auctions, here are some of the other features that we think will be useful for serious domainers:

The domain keywords link to Google, to help research the domain

Generic Domain Finder-filtered-auctions-1

Filtered GoDaddy Auctions

The domain name itself links directly to the auction, so you can place a bid right away. The keywords link directly to Google, so you can better understand what the domain is about. This can be extremely useful for foreign language domains, or domains related to a specific geographic area.

Powerful filters to find the best domains

Domain search filter options

There are options to filter based on the number of keywords in the domain, the number of characters in the domain, the extension (COM, NET, and ORG for now), as well as the automatically appraised value.

One of the most powerful filters is whether the domain has bids or not. For NameJet PreRelease auctions, if you’re the only bidder, you’ll automatically win the domain, without it being sent to auction. By filtering for the best domains without bids, it’s possible to uncover some great deals.

Copy and Paste unformatted domain lists for Appraisal

Posted on September 9, 2011 by admin

We’ve just added a new feature to the appraisal page. You can now copy and paste raw text containing domain names into the appraisal box. This will make it easy to copy and paste names in your NameJet or GoDaddy auction watch lists, or any list of domains that you might have handy.

Take a look at how it works:

Step 1, copy some text, containing domain names you want to appraise.

Step 2, paste the text into the appraisal box.

Step 3, view the results of the appraisal.

Good luck domain hunting!

How our automatic domain appraisal system works

Posted on August 22, 2011 by admin

We’ve recently added a new domain feature, to help estimate the potential value of unregistered domain names. We’re using this new domain appraisal system to show a list of the 10 most valuable domains on every single results page.

Appraised domains in the search results

The appraisal system takes a number of factors into account to generate an estimated value. Some of the factors we consider are:

Number of characters in the domain name. Shorter domains are typically more valuable than longer domains.
Number of words in the domain. Domains with just one or two words, are more valuable than domains with many words.
The domain extension. Certain domain name extensions are much more valuable than others. Obviously, .COM domains are the most valuable.
The estimated commercial value of keywords in the domain. Domains having keywords that have attracted a high number of PPC bidders, and high bid values will be more valuable than domains with little commercial interest.

In the end, the real value of a domain, is what an end user is willing to pay for it. Our system tries to make a reasonable estimate based on a few key signals of a domains value. Because the domain name market is not very liquid, and because end users can be very fickle, we can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to sell a domain for the actual appraised value listed here on Generic Domain Finder. We do think that, as a quick rough estimate, the current appraisal system can be useful.

We’ve drawn quite a bit of inspiration for this automatic appraisal tool from Estibot. If you need a system that is able to take into account previous sales of similar names, or to appraise the value of non generic domain names, we highly recommend signing up for one of their paid subscriptions!

We’ll continue to refine the appraisal system as we go on. Ultimately, we hope to take more data into account in determining accurate values of domains. This would include things like previous sales of similar names, categorization, trademarks, geolocation, and pronounceability.

For now, let us know how we’re doing. Are appraisal values too high? … too low? Are there other factors we should be taking into account? Your feedback is appreciated!

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