I was asked earlier today what happens to domain names which are not renewed or which we have no intention of using again. I have explained what happens in some circumstances but what happens if we just know that we will not be renewing a domain name but that we may want to wreck it for a competitor? A case in point is lanzarotebusiness.com (which I searched for today and found a blog post about) which was registered back in 2003 and which we took over in 2004 as an offshoot of Whitestar I.T Ltd - we ran it as our main brand in Lanzarote for while but decided to switch the brand to lanzabiz.com and propertyinlanzarote.com.
At the time a lot of new people with "web skills" were moving to the island and, truth be told, were the sort of anoraks who really believed that a free copy of Coffecup HTML Editor or Notepad was better for building web sites than Visual Studio and an MSDN subscription. Worse still, this "hand coded is better approach" was being bandied about by people who would charge €50 for a site (which was paid up front) and then many customers would never see them again; these idiots did a lot of damage to the reputable companies on the island.
I will stress that the domain name lanzarotebusiness.com is now owned by someone else and the company who built the site on it are one of the very few design companies in Lanzarote who I respect as competitors (although in different markets). However, before we let the domain lapse we wrecked it by:
- Sticking completely irrelevant content on it for a while (including a massive picture of Bagpuss)
- Leaving it with the default IIS "Under Construction" page for a few months
- Pointing it at some hard porn for a week and then linking it to a pirate music site
This was done because one of the local dickheads offered us a tenner for the name so we let is lapse assuming that they would buy it. Of course, we also knew that they would be very unlikely to sort out the mess we left behind and we would therefore be screwing any chance they had of using it productively! A reputable company would, of course, know how to deal with it and that's what happened in the end.
I would like to set one point straight - in their blog, the current owner of the domain says that we got the domain banned in Google by using "black hat SEO tactics". This is absolutely not the case and the wreckage of the domain was 100% deliberate; as someone who develops using Google API's (including Ad Words, Maps, and AdSense this would really not be commercially sensible.
I feel that sometimes a domain needs to die unless it's going to be looked after and I have no hesitation in sticking the boot into a domain if it will hurt a crap company thinking they can use it - a good competitor will know what to do about it and, if they pick up one of our discarded domains, I wish them all the luck in the world.