More on Para-Sites: It Happened to Me

Yesterday I wrote about the dangers of allowing domain registrations that you’ve actively used for past projects to expire. Well, today I just realized that it has happened to me. It could happen to anyone who fails to pay attention.

A few years ago I was involved in a venture called Content Exchange. It was very popular and cool, but it just didn’t work out as a business. So my partners and I abandoned the project, took down the site, and eventually allowed the doman registration to lapse.

Well, that last part was a mistake. On July 9, 2004, a guy in Australia claimed that domain (which was legally up for grabs) and has posted a get-rich-quick site there – in other words, a fairly typical para-site…

Go see for yourself: content-exchange.com. It’s not particularly objectionable – but it just as easily could have been a porn site or a hate site. For all I know it could become anything in the future, and my former partners and I have zero control over that.

I don’t like sending a para-site additional traffic. However, this opportunity to set an example from an oversight that I contributed to is far too instructive for me to ignore.

Content-Exchange.com probably still attracts a fair amount of residual traffic thanks to live links that remain in many parts of the web. A quick Google search turned up more than 600 web pages that mention the defunct venture, and many of these include live links. We did a good job publicizing that venture while it was active, so I’m not surprised that it was targeted for a para-site.

Oh well, nothing I can do about it now. At least, with this blog posting, there’s a current public record that my former partners and I have not gone into the get-rich quick business.

Para-sites represent a real risk to any person or organization with abandoned or concluded online projects. Again, please don’t ever allow any domains that you’ve actively used to lapse, unless you really don’t care what happens to them and how that may reflect on you in the future. Your online reputation is probably worth a few dollars a year to preserve.

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on October 5, 2004 at 7:52 am and filed under Amy's Adventures, Content Style & Business, Media Musings. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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One Comment

Just a little note to this article, which is certainly good advice. The URL I’ve listed here is for a small site I run about lyrics. But it turns out I am the 3rd owner of the URL. Neither of the previous owners did anything significant with it, and fortunately/unfortunately I can’t find any trace of them (could be a fun article in there). At the time, I bought it as it was listed in Google and available - a para-site by your definition. By the time I bought it, however, there was no actual site under the name.

But I remember for another site I was developing that I spent some time on E-bay looking for domain names with existing traffic and Google registration that might fit the bill. If you’re starting a new venture, it makes a certain amount of sense to start with a name that exists already. You might have to buy the name at a premium, but you are giving yourself a headstart in terms of search engine placement and passing traffic. If your venture involves affiliate marketing (or get-rich schemes), you will be spending money anyway on advertising. Why not spend a little upfront for guaranteed traffic?

Having said that, I don’t see myself doing it unless there is already a very good match in the name and slant of the site.

1. Michael Leahy on October 7th, 2004 at 1:48 am