Job Listing: DomainTools Seeking SEO & Analytics Manager

Elliot Silver
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Are you looking for a job or do you know someone else looking for a job? DomainTools is looking to hire one qualified person for a somewhat dual role in the position of SEO and Analytics Manager. I am sure having experience in, or knowledge of the domain industry would make for an even better job candidate.

According to the job listing posted on LinkedIn:

The right candidate will be able to drive SEO for Google and Bing/Yahoo across our very deep PR 7 site, and will be able to counsel on which tools provide the greatest insight (SEOMoz? Covario? BrightEdge? Marin?) for our needs. The role spans a traffic baseof nearly 500K uniques a day on top of a multi-million dollar business, and has direct visibility from members of our Board of Directors.

Consistent with our staffing philosophy to hire ‘fewer, better employees’ than most companies in Seattle, this role will also pioneer our ANALYTICS efforts company-wide.

Similar to the SEO execution, the company will provide whatever tools and resources that are necessary to help surface the kind of actionable data expected from this discipline. Your role will be to collaboratively lead the what/why/how of everything we measure, including membership growth, ad performance, conversion rates, time-on-site, and much, much more. The right candidate will love data, love insight, and welcome the challenge of a multi-faceted role that will keep him or her very busy and engaged.

The dual SEO and ANALYTICS position is a critical addition to our firm and proven abilities in both disciplines are required. More than that, however, the right candidate will have great determination, the drive to work efficiently and independently, and the personality to gel with 15+ similarly motivated professionals across the company.

You can read more about the position, qualification requirements, and information about the company on the LinkedIn listing. If your domain name-related company is hiring and you’d like some exposure for your job opportunity, please send me the details to post.

Monitor Domain Names Related to Your Websites and Business

Elliot Silver
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I want to share a tip with you that can help you drive traffic and improve your search rankings. Keep your eyes on domain names that are related to your business, both in terms of current registrations and dropping/expiring domain names. If something comes available and it’s not a trademark, acquire it and 301 redirect it.

There have been a number of times I’ve bought descriptive domain names for my websites that have either expired and become available for registration or are in a drop auction. Organizations and companies seem to frequently change domain names, forget to renew domain names, or think they have no more use for a particular domain name.

Whatever the case is, they let great names with inbound links drop. These names may be worth something due to traffic levels, or they may be worth more in terms of search engine optimization value. I discussed buying the domain name previously used by an arena after the management confirmed they didn’t want it. Not only does it bring enough traffic to the page on my site that it’s become a top 5 most visited page, but it has great inbound links from sites like Boston.com.

To watch domain names, I use one primary tool, which is the Domain Monitor tool at DomainTools. This is perfect for domain names I know about, and I follow quite a few, even though I don’t anticipate a drop.

What’s probably more helpful for this type of situation is creating filters at Freshdrop which contain specific keywords I want to monitor. This will let me know when any related domain names will drop, which is helpful because there are plenty of names I don’t really even know about. Freshdrop also allows me to see the domain name’s analytics (age, links, PR…etc), helping me decide if its worth pursuing.

If you have developed websites or a business that you care about, I recommend monitoring domain names that may be beneficial.

Monitoring Domain Name Changes

Elliot Silver
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“Other than sheer luck, how do you know when a domain name like Facetime.com is transferred to another company?”

Although this question may have been more appropriate for DomainQuestions.com (hint, hint), I will answer it here because someone asked me this in response to my article about Apple’s acquisition of Facetime.com.

As I mentioned in my article, I can’t personally take credit for discovering the domain transfer, but my bet is that Mark was monitoring the domain name via the domain monitor tool at DomainTools.  With the tool, you can monitor the domain status, a registrar change, expiration date changes, and nameserver changes.

Access to the tool is given to customers with a DomainTools account, even the free accounts.  100 domain names can be monitored if you have a free account, and up to 10,000 domain names can be monitored with the professional account level.

I believe I’ve written about this tool before, but it’s a great tool to use to keep your eye on important domain names, either for your own portfolio, to monitor competitors, or for voyeuristic reasons.

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Do You Subscribe to DomainTools?

Elliot Silver
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I think DomainTools’ Whois History tool is the most important domain tool I use, and it is only available to people with active DomainTools memberships. The History tool allows me to see who previously owned a domain name, and it can be used to make sure there hasn’t been any suspicious activity on a domain name.

To be blunt, I don’t know how anyone would be comfortable buying an expensive domain name in the aftermarket without doing a proper search using this particular history tool, since there don’t seem to be any competitors.

Earlier today, someone asked me to run a poll to see how many people here have DomainTools accounts, and I think that’s a pretty decent idea. Check out the poll below:


DomainTools Undergoes Site Redesign

Elliot Silver
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DomainTools WhoisIf you are an active DomainTools user like me, you’ve probably noticed the DomainTools.com website has undergone an extensive re-design. I first noticed it live last night when doing a Whois search, and I saw the rest of the reveal this morning when the entire site went back online.

I was given an opportunity to test the site just prior to launch, and I am impressed with how easy it is to find everything. I was also able to discover a couple of tools I didn’t even know about. The company made sure to keep many things familiar, so the layout of records on Whois lookups is virtually the same.

It appears that the pricing structure and pricing have changed. Gone are the confusing “units,” replaced with actual costs in dollars. This is a very positive change, as it makes more sense to know what your costs will be rather than having to buy “units” of something that was previously a bit unclear to me. I have been assured that pricing structure will remain the same for current subscribers like myself, although the company did increase its pricing for the first time in ten years.

If you are an active user, I strongly recommend taking a tour of the website to save yourself some time. Maybe you’ll even discover a new tool along the way.

Make Sure Your Email Address is Accurate

Elliot Silver
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Almost every morning, I receive a Registrant Alert email from DomainTools informing me of newly archived domain names (in their database) that are registered to my domain name and those names that were transferred out or expired. I don’t remember when I signed up for the alerts, but they’re helpful to my business.

A couple of months ago, I started seeing random domain names that were registered to my email address but definitely were not owned by me. At first, I thought it was an accident and an anomaly, but over the past couple of months, I’ve received a whole bunch of notices for domain names I don’t own but are registered to my email address.

After seeing a few of these come through, I did some research and noticed there is very generic registrant information (ie no business or personal name). Additionally, I confirmed that the domain names are registered to my email address, so technically I could request the password and likely the EPP authorization code for the domain names to transfer or change the DNS (not legal).

To make things worse, these aren’t just domain names… Almost every one is a developed website, and they all appear to be physical businesses. Ordinarily, I would reach out to the website owner via the contact form on the site, but the sites are all in Russian. My guess is that they were all developed by the same company (or hosted by the same company) and the host or developer changed his registrant information to mine in error.

This is just a reminder to 1) always keep your Whois information accurate and 2) always manage your own domain names.

Obviously I am not going to do anything nefarious with these domain names, but the owners likely won’t receive their expiration notices.

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