You’ve just come up with the perfect business plan and name. You’ve even checked to see that the domain is available. Not only that, but you’ve even BOUGHT the domain, paid for hosting, printed up your stationery, and started your pay per click campaigns. Then you try to upload your files, and nothing happens. You contact your host and they tell you sorry, your domain name has been stolen right out from under you, registered by someone else. That’s right. STOLEN.

Who could possibly do such a thing, and how?

Metapredict.com / UltraRPM.com is a company that has been mysteriously registering people’s domain names right after they have been searched for, for at least the past six months, with over 600000 registered domains. I found a link here: http://www.webhosting.info/registrars/reports/METAPREDICT.COM which shows this statistic.

Metapredict.com has a site online, and like UltraRPM.com, has a domain search box on their home page. Many people who end up there probably don’t know about Metapredict’s history of registering people’s domain names just after they are typed into domain search boxes, so they innocently enter the domain they are interested it to see if it is available, only to have it stolen right out from under them.

Even worse, many in the industry suspect they are running spyware at other popular domain registration sites and hosting companies.

So even when you think you have registered the site, if you can’t make changes to it, and a place holder card with all sorts of ads on it appears, you might have been the victim of “domain kiting”.

The ICANN Wiki explains “domain kiting” or “domain tasting”:

Because there is a 5 day grace period which for returning and receiving a refund on a domain, registrants are utilizing this to register domains, test them for traffic and keep the domains which are monetizable. This approach has the potential to be particularly lucrative and low risk because these businesses can test the residual traffic of a domain name before paying for it. In addition, the registrant can benefit from any residual income from the traffic received during the five day period even if the domain is refunded.

I had never heard of it til I got kited myself last week. I registered and paid for my new domains and had all my content ready to go with my new site, and couldn’t access it.

So I contacted hostgator, and they told me that MetaPredict was showing as the owner of my brand new domain name that I had a cpanel and site manager for!

They gave me these contact details.

Registrant:
MetaPredict
87 East Green Street
Suite 305
Pasadena, California 91105
United States

I can’t think how this happened except for spyware running at the hosting company. I bought and paid for the domains within seconds after going to hostgator, and I am on a Mac.

Admittedly the two domains were in a popular keyword area, which was why I was trying to aim for that niche.

Some people say that if there is a gap between registration and payment, they can take advantage of that. I my case, Hostgator takes payment through Paypal, so we are talking a 1 minute window of opportunity, and I STILL got kited.

Thieving a domain name is theft of intellectual property at the very least.

So what can you do if your domain has been kited?

Do not try to get your domain name back until after the 5-day grace period is over. Metapredict.com register the domain for a 5-day trial and probably only keep the domains that look like there is interest in.

Wait until at least 5 days after your domain name has been taken to see if it becomes available again. If it doesn’t become available, then you could contact Metapredict / UltraRPM.

If your domain has been taken by UltraRPM (dba Metapredict.com) their contact information can be found on Metapredict.com (trent@metapredict.com) or on ICANN.org which gives Metapredict.com contact information as: Trent Cooper +1-626-796-1004. Though I hear in the forums that it is just a voicemail.

If your domain involved a corporate or trademark name, gather all of your paperwork together to support your case that they are violating your trademark.

It has been a week since this happened, so I have written a cease and desist and demanded my domains back. I will keep you all posted on my progress.

I wish readers the best of luck in getting your domains back.

For those of you thinking of registering a domain, buy and pay for it quickly, so there is little or no opportunity to get kited.

Progress update- 2 days later: My host informs me I have got my sites back, and I am just waiting for them to propagate now.

Many people wonder if it is worthwhile to take the time and effort to create and xml google site map, in the hopes of it improving their ranking or quality score with Google.

For most of us small business owners, we do not have access to the hosting server to put the Google software tool on to do it automatically, and some of don’t know xml from an xray.

But there is hope!

I personally have not submitted a full-fledged site map. However, there is a way to get your site spidered by Google quickly and easily, at least once a week. My site is spidered daily, actually, I think because I have an RSS feed at it. But that is a topic for a different post!

So how can you ‘talk’ to Google more often?

In your free GMAIL account, there are various free tools. One of the tabs, Webmaster Tools, has a way to VERIFY your domain with Google by putting a small piece of code in the metatag on your homepage.(Look on the top left when you are logged in to gmail and choose account if you want to see a full list of all the things Google offers for free within Gmail. One you get to the next screen you will see an icon that looks like a group og computers in various colors.)

Once you verify your account that, you start getting great reports on what people are not only searching for, but clicking through on, the top 20 for each, and what you rank on for each of these terms as well.

It also shows all your internal and external links, pages, and most important keywords. It also shows me the exact date and time since I was last spidered.

It is a completely free tool. Ever since I started using it about a year ago, it has been getting better. Now it gives more and more reports, most of which you can download as CSV files.
The reports give you the knowledge of what people are REALLY searching for, and what is bringing them to your site. You can break it down per country as well, and they will be adding countries as they get their new offices set up in China, Singapore and Australia.

They also have mobile search as well, so as I said, the kinds of reports they are adding help me to create more products that I know people are interested in. How do I know? My weekly reports are tellling me.

The tools and reports are all easy to use, so I would recommend anyone set up a free gmail account, request a verification code, copy and paste the code, put it on their homepage in the metatag (the instructions are very clear) and once the account is verified, your site profile results will start coming in.

 B2B and B2C are acronyms for business-to-business or business-to-consumer activities.

Many websites focus on business-to-business relationships and services (like wholesale suppliers).

While others focus on providing services and products to direct to consumers.

Sometimes you will see P2P, Peer to Peer, or B2E, Business to Education.

Domain Name

This is the address or URL of a particular website. For example www.Google.com is the domain name for the Google search engine.

Search-engineers-inc.com is the domain name of this site.

The domain name is the text name that covers up the numeric IP address of a computer that is hooked up to the Internet.

Domain names make the World Wide Web more user-friendly. Instead of having to remember a string of numbers, we can remember the name of the website.

Registering a domain name for an online venture can cost as little as $10. Website domain names are registered to prevent people from using the same name for their website.

There are several different companies that allow you to register a website and many of these companies offer hosting packages as well.

Network solutions is one of the most reliable and has been around for many years. Others will offer hosting and other services; for example, yahoo. Com and hostgator.com offers a full suite of tools, including email editor, easy upload, and ecommerce components.

A crawler (also called a spider) is a program that searches the Internet and locates new public resources. These resources can include web documents and other types of files.

Crawlers report their finds to an Internet database (called indexing).

Each search engine has its own crawler program that crawls the Internet for new material to list on the search engine.

Spider technology is necessary because the amount of information being added to the Internet on a daily basis is more than any human team can index.

Search engine results pages are delivered up in response to a query based on what pages have been crawled, and how relevant they are deemed to the topic at hand.

With SEO, you are trying to get your page crawled and deemed relevant. There are a number of different strategies to do both.