One of the most (in)famous domains on the planet: Sex.com is up for grabs again.
Anyone fancy chipping in to buy it? :-)

Sex.com was one of the springboards to lift the domaining industry out of obscurity, due to the crazy journey it’s been on and the amount of money involved in that journey…

…first registered along with other A-list domains like Jobs.com, Housing.com & Autos.com by Gary Kremen in the early nineties, SEX.com was then ‘allegedly acquired by fraudulent means’ by Stephen Michael Cohen about a year after Kremen had registered it.

Cohen had just been released from Jail for other fraudulent activities and swiped the lucrative domain name by forging a letter from Kremen’s company stating Kremen had been fired and the firm no longer needed the domain and was giving it to Cohen. Nice guy!

Network Solutions the registrar accepted the letter and transferred the domain to Cohen who then went on to make a cool $100 million from the domain over the next 5 years. The domain was apparently receiving 25 million visits a day in it’s heyday!

Kremen eventually got the domain back and the courts ordered Cohen to pay Kremen $65 Million for loss of earnings and compensation. The courts were unable to put a figure on other ‘perks’ associated with the business! ;-) Cohen did what most good upstanding citizens would do and fled to Tijuana in Mexico without paying a penny!
He was then arrested in Mexico for immigration violations and has since been released and is still appealing the case.

Sex.com has since been sold to Escom LLC in 2006 for $14 million but earlier this year it was ordered to be sold at a foreclosure auction which never happened due to technical reasons and is now up for public sale on Sedo.com who are the exclusive brokers for the domain.

I wonder where the journey of Sex.com will go next, how will the saga continue?

If you’re interested in purchasing the domain, you better raid your piggy bank coz I hear Sedo are expecting around 8 figures for the domain – you can put in your offers here.

Maybe if we get enough people to chip in we could put in a cheeky offer of $5m and see what happens ;-)

After speaking at Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge Coming Home Conference in Melbourne last month and prior to the launch of Domain Face I’ve had an influx of people asking me whether buying aged domain names for SEO value is seen by Google as white hat or grey hat, so I’m going to use this post to explore the subject.

I’ll use the term ‘aged’ throughout, which means the domain name is pre-owned and isn’t brand new/unregistered.

I buy aged domain names through various different avenues:

- Contacting owners direct
- Auctions – sold by owner
- Auctions – Pre-release sold by registrar before they delete
- Forums
- Brokers

So why do I buy aged domains?

Because I’m frustrated at the increasingly difficult task of sourcing brand new domains with the keywords or branding I’m looking for and also because I may need other SEO factors to beat my competition within a particular niche.

If I can find an older domain name, with a higher Google page rank, more quality back links and pages indexed than my competitors then I’m starting on a very good foot and it saves me slogging my guts out doing all the initial ground work needed to compete with them.

I will probably pay a small premium for this but it far beats the time, effort and money to do it from scratch! And it’s much cheaper than buying a full-blown website!

If I were to do an analogy I would compare domain names to plots of land:

- Unregistered/brand new domain names are bare, baron plots of land with NO Infrastructure

- Aged domain names with good SEO value are like a fertile plots of land with a Good Infrastructure ready to roll: foundations laid, water mains, electricity, gas, access roads, telephone/broadband lines etc

If you were building a property fast and had the choice of building on a plot of land with or without infrastructure, which would you choose?

So because I have found an easier way of doing things does it make it tainted in any way?

Not to me!

Why would renovating an old domain name (or website for that matter) be grey hat? Why would giving them a new lease of life rather than letting them wither away and die be wrong?

If it was seen as unethical then every website sale going forward would be included, which would mean Google would need to penalise a domain/website every time a domain was transferred or contact details were changed.

Can you imagine being the proud new owner of Business.com (reportedly sold for circa $340m) only to find as soon as the transaction was made and domain transferred to you, Google delists it?

Google has all the necessary measures in place to see whether a website should rank for a particular keyword or phrase so as long as you follow the usual ethical techniques once you buy the domain then the Google Gods should be ok with it.

Rule of thumb – Check the previous content of an aged domain on Archive.org and replace it with content that is equal or BETTER than was on previously in order to offer a good visitor experience. Do this as soon as possible.

As long as your intentions are good then when you purchase an aged domain name, you are buying it complete with the good will from the previous owner which along with many other possible values includes SEO value and if you keep the website in the spirit of it’s previously owner then Google ‘should’ be ok with it.

Always remember to carry out the usual due diligence when buying aged domains.

Happy domaining….

In this video I explain how to utilise DNForum to sell domain names and cover:

- how to get attention with compelling thread titles

- How to drive more traffic, more views & ultimately more eye balls

- how to find specific domain buyers

- how to utilise the forum to flip web properties on other sites like Flippa

This video explains where to find great domain names on DN Forum

DNForum is a big old forum & it takes some getting used to so this video shows you the best places to look for those hidden gems!

It is the 2nd in a 3 part series

All above links to DNForum are affiliate links if you would prefer not to go via affiliate link click here

After losing 2 hours of work (due to my mac crashing) earlier in the week – on my supposed first blog post of the decade (about new my new years resolutions!!!) I decided to cool off for a few days. Whilst going about my usual perusal of DNForum I decided that people need to know about this little gold mine of information on domain names.
This Video is my (revised) first blog post of the decade & is the first in a 3 part series about the domain name forum and gives an overview of what goodies can be found inside.

Part 2 of the series will be on how to find great domain names on DNForum.

All above links to DNForum are affiliate links if you would prefer not to go via affiliate link click here

This video explains why Dynamite Domains are easy pickings during the Christmas Holidays.

I’ve included 2 awesome Page Rank 4 domains that should be low hanging fruit over this festive period – One has a DMOZ listing and both would be great for content cluster sites.

This is my first video for the blog so please give me feedback so I can improve them over time.