Domain name offer spam emails

Domain Name Offers Via Email

I have just received an unsolicited email from a person purporting to be Dale Stirling of HSBF Internet (hsbf.com) informing me that they have conservatoryfloors.co.uk available for sale and wondering if I was interested.

It always worries me when I receive unsolicited emails for companies who appear to be experts in their field and yet the domain name that they are using to send the spam email from, doesn’t even have a website attached to it, which is the case with HSBF.com. Now, I don’t know Dale Stirling and I have no reason to suspect that there isn’t a perfectly good reason why HSBF Internet doesn’t have a published web site on the URL that they are using, but it did raise my suspicions, ever so slightly.

I mention this as a lead in to explain how to grade the value of a domain name, as HSBF were attempting to flog me the domain name, conservatoryfloors.co.uk. Quite why they thought I would be interested in the conservatory floors domain name, I’m not sure, but such is the randomness of this kind of spam, that I won’t worry about their reasons.

So, conservatoryfloors.co.uk - just how strong a domain name is it? Let’s see.

First of all, I checked the PageRank and the established, incoming links to the site - no links and no PageRank. Not good so far.

I thought it must be fully cached in Google and well established? No, not even in the Google or MSN index and not fully indexed in Yahoo - losing it’s appeal.

It must be a long established name with years of longevity? Nope, conservatoryfloors.co.uk was registered only 6 months ago.

The website itself is well designed, on focus and fully optimised? I’m afraid not. It’s an affiliate site, designed to make money from click-throughs: the very kind of site that Google is trying to keep out of it’s index. Of course, it’s only the domain name that is for sale, but if it is already under a penalty, even the best SEO in the world won’t make it fire up the search engines.

At least it’s a good brand-able name? Afraid not. The conservatoryfloors.com version is already owned by someone else and the hyphened versions, (conservatory-floors.com and conservatory-floors.co.uk) are still available if anyone wants to buy them for as little as £2.59 for a year. If you are going to buy a domain name and build a brand identity in the UK, you need to own the .com and .co.uk version of the name with and without the hyphens. Otherwise, someone can come in with a better optimised site and steal your thunder. Even worse, they could use the domain name as a hate site or a porn site, which wouldn’t do your brand-name any good at all.

To be fair, Dale Stirling of HSBF.com didn’t state how much he wanted for the domain name. He may wish to sell it for five pounds, which is the rough value of the remaining registration, but I suspect he was looking for a tad more than that for it.

Check the value of a domain name before buying

If anyone offers you a domain name for sale, don’t be taken in by a salesman telling you the domain name will automatically give you top spot on the search engines for the related search terms, it simply isn’t true. Judge the value for yourself.

If I sold conservatory floors and this domain was five years old, had an established website, with 150 indexed pages, was PageRank 5, had 500 quality incoming links, lots of front page search engine positions and the other versions of the domain names were available for me to buy, it could be worth from ten thousand pounds to half a million pounds, depending on the turnover that it produced in the past three years.

Sadly, as a domain name that is 6 months old, a poor quality site that may already have been penalised, no PageRank, no links, not indexed, no positions and the three other domain names are either taken or available for peanuts,  this isn’t worth any more than the money it would cost if you were the original registrant.

I should state again, the purpose of this article is to point out the value of domain names and not to, in any way, suggest that HSBF are anything but an honest, legitimate company, offering website names at a fair price. After all, the value you of a product is decided on how much a customer is willing to pay for it, not the actual value of the product itself.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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