Unethical Registrar Practices

[IncrediBILL]

Since this has mostly devolved into a spam discussion, are you aware that many hosted sites on certain hosts or registrars out there are doing some fake home page frames for SEO value?

The home page of every site these places host goes something like this:


<frameset>
<frame name="MYTOPFRAME" src="http://www.xyzcompany.com/actualdomainname" noresize>
<noframes>
Click here to go to the site....
Domain Name Registration and Domain Name Forwarding by xyzcompany.com- Register your domain name.
</noframes>

The beauty of this trick is all modern browsers have frames so the domain owner will never see this but all of the search engines certainly will.

Now THAT's clearly intent to spam and far worse than anything Mahalo is doing, intentional or not.

If you want to out these registrars (http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&newwindow=1&safe=active&c2coff=1&q=%22Domain+Name+Registration+and+Domain+Name+Forwarding+by+namesdirect.com%22&btnG=Search) it could be an interesting thread! ;)

[ihelpyou]

Good one Bill !! :cheers:

Can we split your post into a new OUTING thread and then can we link to EACH of those registrars so that Google can go through and ban each of them?

[WebSavvy]

Bill, that's lousy that they're doing this. That really STINKS.

Yeah, I'm all for splitting it off into a new thread and ousting these scumbags, Doug.

[g1smd]

There's no apostraphe in registrars. :hi:

[ihelpyou]

Could someone please list out all those registrars in that SERP result Bill posted and then actually live link to their sites?

It's not really "dishonest" as such, so maybe the title could be changed to:

Registrars are Search Engine Spammers

something like that? :)

[WebSavvy]

Originally posted by g1smd
There's no apostraphe in registrars. :hi:
LOL. Yeah, just had my program read it back to me and caught that just now. Fixing it.

[IncrediBILL]

Ya know, I'm not sure exactly if it's the registrar, host or both doing this thing and I'm not positive it's more than one of them.

It will take a while before I can reprocess the list of domains where I caught this NOFRAME technique in use and see how widespread the practice is.

The few I know off the top of my head are all hosted in this range of IPs:

DOTSTER INC INAP-WDC002-DOTSTER-7185 (NET-69-25-27-160-1)
69.25.27.160 - 69.25.27.191

and

DOTSTER INC INAP-SEF-DOTSTER-7186 (NET-66-150-161-128-1)
66.150.161.128 - 66.150.161.159

[ihelpyou]

Dotster is my registrar. LOL

I know they just got into hosting recently, so it may be a case of a real registrar getting into something they know very little about and given bad advice about it.

[WebSavvy]

Bill, they all seem to be connected to Names Direct. MyDomain.com is connected with them also. I had a dedicated server through mydomain.com and happened across some funny stuff too.

I posted a thread about it in the Chat area here at the time.

This site is a victim:
http://www.fmsw.org/

It has the iframe code -- you can see it in Firefox when you view source but when looking in AOL(IE) it displays the iframe code in the page so you don't even see it.

DNS Servers:
NS1.NAMERESOLVE.COM
NS2.NAMERESOLVE.COM
NS3.NAMERESOLVE.COM
NS4.NAMERESOLVE.COM

Registrar: Namesdirect.com

This site is also a victim:
http://imagineaudiomedia.com/

DNS Servers:
NS1.NAMESDIRECT.COM NS2.NAMESDIRECT.COM

REGISTRAR: GoDaddy.com

So, two sites with different Registrars. One is registered through GoDaddy and the other through NamesDirect.

The only connection between them is their host. Namesdirect.com & Nameresolve.com are BOTH the same company.

This is a web host gone rogue (though they also provide domain registration services).

[SEFL]

It wouldn't be all that difficult to target the registrars in question. There's a term for this, and it has been going on for years. It's called frame forwarding or URL forwarding, and here's the general scenario.

Bob registers domain name.
Bob is too cheap to pay the $5-$10 a month (or less) for hosting.
Bob hosts it for free on some crap-assed hosting plan (usually Geocities, Tripod, Bravenet, whatever.)
Domain registrar "frame forwards" the domain to Bob's free site. Users type in www.bobsdomain.com and get forwarded to www.geocities.com/bob/is/too/bloody/cheap/for/his/own/good

https://www.domaindiscover.com/help/kb?faq=domain;_sid=8xNYIcdJ2xTr7knABT61deWD01#20

http://www.networksolutions.com charges $12 a year for theirs. You gotta love those idiots.

Note: I'm not condoning the idea. I'm just explaining it for those who haven't heard of it before (those people that lurk but never post).

[ihelpyou]

ah yes. it sure has been going on for years. It's a case of the registrar not knowing the harm it can cause, and a case of owners not knowing anything at all. It's the blind leading the blinder. :) (so to speak)... NO harm intended towards the blind. It's a figure of speak.

Sometimes I feel I have to exactly and clearly clarify myself. :D

[g1smd]

Whenever I come across these cheapskates I show them the results of a Google site: search and get them to take up some proper hosting.

The company I use charges about 45 quid for two years hosting (that's about USD 90, I guess) and has ample bandwidth, reasonable uptime, allows usage of custom 404 pages, and 301 redirects in .htaccess, has PHP installed, and so on.

Any business that can't afford to do that, really has fallen on hard times.



Just say NO to framed redirects, javascript redirects, meta refreshes, and all that stuff.
Host the site properly with the domain name directly associated with that hosting.

[WebSavvy]

Shut up Doug. LMAO :lol: