News: 1607689572

Ahhh, another benefit of an Australian-style Brexit! Getting in the spirit, earlier I see.

In Boris-speak an Australian shipping company is one that has been contracted by Chris Grayling.

I assume she gives Canadian conditions... which are apparently superior????

I find this hard to understand: why would someone pay good money to buy an expiring domain and then redirect it to a completely irrelevant business? Yes there might be a small number of new customers from those "oh look where my old link or bookmark takes me now" moments, but are we really talking about enough profit to justify the cost of doing this? And if what they really want is to sell the domain to a higher bidder later, then they don't make it at all obvious it's for sale. Or could the redirection just be a front for some more clandestine operation that somehow requires a long-established domain?

The same thing happened to homenet.org in 2017. That one used to be a hobbyist dynamic DNS site for home servers (with 105 users), but when it expired, DropCatch sold the name to a certain resident of Kiev who somehow thought it was worth bidding 2,060 US dollars just to redirect it to a list of hotels in Vienna. Apparently that buyer paid similar amounts to win other domains and redirect them to random other hotel sites. And yet I don't think any of the old Homenet users are going to say "wow, I should book a trip to Vienna" instead of "bother, the server I wanted has moved". How can it possibly be worth paying thousands of dollars per domain to redirect that kind of traffic?

(I suppose buyers might think there is a small possibility of gaining a little extra Google PageRank from other sites that fail to update old links to the domain they bought, but is this negligible PageRank really worth over 2000 dollars? How many non-updating incoming links did they think HomeNet had?)

I've always assumed it's a way for the domain-name squatters to earn an extra few pennies, presumably there's some service somewhere you can throw a small amount of money at for them to redirect some of the domains they're sitting upon for some period of time?

The one domain name I've ever given up, which I didn't even use, is now under the ownership of such a company and would apparently cost me $2,400 to buy back. Given that I'm not interested, and I don't imagine anybody else would be, maybe this is how they'll squeeze back some of the £10 or whatever that they invested in the hope that I might pay?

I can understand why they'd do that if it cost them £10, but I still don't understand how anyone thinks it's worth $2,060 to do that. Unless they plan to do something else later, but homenet.org is still redirecting to Hotels in Vienna after more than 3 years. Seems like the catcher companies have a good business from highly-speculative investors though.

I was thinking I was missing something really obvious but apparently not.

I can see the logic if the name was similar, if it was the same but a different TLD, even if it was a competitor (for sport and general amusement) but otherwise what is the point?

and domein = domain obvs.

I believe having links from a popular website that ranks well on Google search pointing your own relatively obscure website, will give your obscure website a boost in Googles ranking.

So I suspect that with Katherine Ryan being relatively well known now her website would have be well ranked on Google and thus this shipping company would find its website doing better in Google searches after getting all those links now pointing to it.

I am not expert on SEO but I remember reading that a while ago, and with Googles search algorithm changing all the time this may no longer be the case

Any potential benefit would probably be negated by Google downgrading websites that have multiple domain names pointing to them unless the only differ by TLD.