The circumstances right out of the box were frustrating: I experienced the "NetSol hold" when I went to a cheaper registrar only to find out the domain that NetSol said was available was now "unavailable." We all know about this evil tactic.
So I came back, hat in hand, and gave these extortionists my $34.99-- about five times what I could have bought it for somewhere else.
Now, four days later, I'm fooling around on the Web with a glass of workmanlike merlot and type my domain into IE. What to my wondering eyes should appear, but an affiliate site that has links to tons of other sites-- mostly affiliate sites-- in my market niche.
I run a "view source" and find that a company in Kingstown, VC, which I believe is in the Grenadine Islands, is running this site. I'm not enough of a programmer/code guy to understand the code, but the first line of the source code reads:
<!--
window.location = 'http://www.#*$!#*$!.com/?dn=yyyyyy.com&pid=2PO7ZX28Q';
/*
-->
Where www.#*$!#*$!.com is the other site and yyyyyy.com is my domain.
I got NetSol customer service on the phone and a helpful guy changed the link over the the more familiar NetSol "site under construction" page we all know-- the one that cycles through several languages.
The customer service guy told me they'd received several complaints like mine.
I told him that it was inconceivable to me that somebody like NetSol would abuse their position to run a scam like this on their customers' domain names, obviously to make money by entering into agreements like this. And who knows how this situation will prejudice my brand new domain with Google et. al. ?
Anybody else have experiences like this? Incredible!
Thanks for the reply. Apparently this is indeed becoming a common practice. Do you know whether if Google spiders the site, the practice will adversely affect the domain's search engine status? Or will Google ignore the site since it originates from a NetSol server?
In the upper right hand corner of the page it says,
"Network Solutions
Coming soon!
This site is under construction."
But that's about it. Except for a boilerplate footer menu, the rest is, for all practical purposes a Web page that is linked to many affiliate sites selling the types of financial services clustered around the keywords in my domain name.
It may take 24 hours for the classic NetSol "site under construction" page to go up. I wonder what might happen if Google spiders the page.
I have noticed Google and Yahoo crawling, presumably from tracking the registration, so they probably are aware whats on the site, but whether they go 'domain parked - black mark' or 'domain parked - ignore till later' or something else - I don't know.
And I suspect that this practice may have caused problems for various new domains. It could take weeks and months to undo the Google damage from a page like this.
It's now fixed; I just checked again and one of the classic "under construction, site coming soon" holding pages is now up instead.
I can only hope that googlebot didn't find that last page....
Its pretty common that if you just leave a new domain in the registrar's hands they will run advertising on it.
Especially if you register a new domain name and didn't input your own DNS.
You learn something new every other day.
David
Its pretty common that if you just leave a new domain in the registrar's hands they will run advertising on it.
Many years ago there was a class action suit brought against a registrar because of this practice. Since then it has become part, AFAIK, of every registrar's Registration Agreement, wherein you agree that the registrar can do that.
In the particular case, the "class" received a coupon worth something (but not much) towards a future registration with that registrar. The original named plaintiff received peanuts (a few thousand dollars as I recall), and the class action attorneys received, as I recall, hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and legal fees.
You did not have to call them to correct it. You can just log-in your your Netsol account and change it.
I no longer have a Netsol account. :)
Many years ago there was a class action suit brought against a registrar because of this practice. Since then it has become part, AFAIK, of every registrar's Registration Agreement, wherein you agree that the registrar can do that.In the particular case, the "class" received a coupon worth something (but not much) towards a future registration with that registrar. The original named plaintiff received peanuts (a few thousand dollars as I recall), and the class action attorneys received, as I recall, hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and legal fees.
If that's who I think it is, you're really confusing the two. That registrar indeed
had 2 separate suits brought against them.
One was for putting parking pages on the client's domain name, which they did
win. The other, the class action suit you've stated here, was for autorenewing
clients' domains without their consent, but that was a very fact-specific one.
David
If that's who I think it is, you're really confusing the two.
David,
Apparently we are thinking about different cases/registrars.
I've sent you a sticky with links that document the settlement of the class action suit brought against a registrar for putting up a "Coming Soon" page on a newly registered domain name, that linked back to the registrar.
The actual numbers (which I originally quoted from memory) were USD $12,500 for the lead plaintiff; a USD $5.00 coupon to members of the class (good for a future purchase at said registrar); and USD $642,500 to the lawyers.
