The untold story how domain conflicts can severely impact your parking revenues.
If you are an active domainer and you buy, sell, trade, register, drop, taste domains, then you are surely being affected by domain ownership conflicts at the various parking companies.
These are the known issues:
Anyone can add a list of domains to a parking account and state that they own these names. Parking companies then have to decide who the current and real owner is. And no, doing a whois search does not help here, that is not in most cases… as like most domainers, whois privacy is more and more common, and fake or offshore entities are even more common for domainers that wish to remain unknown, just in case they have a TM based domain that they know or do not know they own.
But I digress… so what actually happens when you have 2 parking accounts both claiming ownership of the same domain? Who get the traffic and earnings allocated to their account? Do you know? Do you even know where to find in your account any reported domain conflicts?
This is what happens, the 1st account that added the said domains will continue to benefit from these domains, even if a subsequent user later adds the same domain to a new account.
What do the parking companies do? Honestly and unfortunately not much!! Why, because they can not. The task is too hard and complex and can cause a logistical headache. For example what if the parking company moved domains out of one account to another in error, now is this worse than not moving them out in the first place? I suppose it depends on who the parking client is. Parking companies can not afford to upset their clients, there are just too many alternative parking services out there just waiting for them to slip so that they can take their place.
How do you make your parking company move the domains and more importantly credit your account with the revenues made by someone else off your domains?
Apart from the obvious, talk to your account rep to get them moved. Sometimes domains are moved, but in some the account holder that the domains are being moved away from states, “no we own these domains, so do not move them”.
What then?? This is where you need to prove ownership. You can provide registrar screen shots, but I find that by changing the DNS on the domains, this is the best and quickest way to prove ownership. Once done this, your account manager will quickly move these domains over to your account 😉 and you can change back the DNS. Unfortunately all of this however takes time, effort and while the DNS propagates you are losing parking revenues. But at least not for as long as when the domains are in someone else’s parking account!!!
What step should you take to address domain conflicts before they arrise?
1. Do a domain audit. Basically cross check your domains in your registrar accounts against those in the parking accounts. If you participate in drop service, then you probably have a lot of different registrar accounts, so this task can be time consuming. But while you are doing this, this is a great time to also consolidate your domains to a single or fewer registrar accounts. When doing an audit, do not rely on your internal systems, far too often internal systems contain domains that you no longer own and even domains you never owned. Trust what domains are in your registrar accounts.
2. Add your current list of domains to your parking accounts, all of them. If you have identified any domains that you have in your registrar accounts that are not in your parking accounts, make sure to add them.
3. Contact your parking accounts reps and ask them if there are any domain conflicts on your account, and if so ask for a list of the domains. Make sure to cross check these domains that you still own them and those that you do tell your rep. And yes please be ethical here, report the ones that you no longer own as well.
4. Schedule to audit your domains on a frequent basis, the more active you are, the more domains you have renewing/expiring, the more domains you pick up, the most often you should perform a domain audit.
5. I have left the best solution for last… Some parking services offer the ability to use URL Redirects or Registrar accounts, where along with the domain traffic you send to the parking company, you are also passing your specific account ID. This is a full proof way to make sure that your account is allocated the traffic and domain earnings, from all the domains you own, regardless if there are domain conflicts reported. I STRONGLY recommend substantial portfolio owners, and especially domainers that are constantly adding new domains, to use these type of parking accounts.
As domainers we should be getting together and asking “nicely” all parking companies that currently do not offer URL redirects or Registrar accounts, to do so, or face losing domains accounts to parking companies that do offer such solutions.
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