When owning a domain name the owner is required to submit certain data about himself to complete the registration. Name and address information as well as a phone number and an email address are required to be on file. If these pieces of information are not provided the registration can either not be completed or is not valid and the domain name could be taken away.

Often people forget to keep this information updated. This is not a dramatic issue until the domain name expires and needs to be renewed. If the owner keeps track of the names it is no problem, but too often people tend to forget. Email reminders are usually send out by all domain registries. But what happens if the email addresses associated with the domain name are no longer in use? The domain name expiration notification cannot be delivered and the name expires.

What happens when a domain expires?

When a domain expires it will remain in this status for approximately 30 days. During that time the DNS servers of the expired domain will be reset to the domain name registry and the website behind that domain name is down. If the domain name does not get renewed during 30 day time frame, it will be deleted from the domain registry database and at that time the domain will go into Redemption status at the Registry level. The domain name is still recoverable, but only for a significant amount of money. After around 40 days the domain name gets deleted and released and is available for a new registration. Domain Grabbers pick up these expired names and sell them with a profit to whoever pays the most money. If an owner happens to lose a domain name by forgetting about renewing the name and by not acting fast enough when the name is expired, it can mean that the name cannot be recovered by him and that the name belongs to somebody else now.

Therefore it is highly critical to always maintain correct WHOIS data for a domain name and to keep track of expiration dates to renew domain names in an appropriate time frame.

About the Author

Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and international book author. Websites of Christoph Puetz can be found at Pregnancy Announcements and at Highlands Ranch Colorado.

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–About Domain Names–

Choosing a domain name for your web site is a major step for any individual or organization. You need domain names that are sticky, short, meaningful, easy to remember and at the roll of your tongue!

It is very easy to choose a domain name but difficult to find a good name, simply because of the fact that most of the good domain names are taken up by organisations. These domain name organisations take up hundreds of thousands of domain names and treat them as investments. It is not as easy to choose a good domain name. Sometimes, even web professionals spend hours at their computers to find good domain names!

Domain name registrations are cheap to maintain and subscriptions typically last a year. The subscriptions are renewable and paid to registrars by the design companies.

The most common domain names end with .com, .net, etc. Country specific domain names will end with com.au, co.uk, .co.jp, etc. For organisations, domain names will end with .org or be country specific- .org.au, .org.uk, etc.

Not sure about domain names and web sites? Seek web professional help.

Lester Boey works in an Australian SEO and Web Design company (Australian Search Engine Optimization and Web Designs Company). His life revolves around SEO; providing full-time and freelance seo services to US and Australian businesses. Email: projects@definiteweb.com

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The Registration of domain names is a thriving business on the Internet today - this is evident by the high bids that companies are willing to pay in Per-Per-Click (PPC) engines to attract potential customers for domain name registration.

The business of domain name registration is sometimes referred to as “Internet Real Estate”. Just like we can occupy high traffic areas in the central business districts of major cities in the real world, we can register domains for commonly used words or sought after keywords to generate traffic more easily to our websites. While most common words and abbreviations have already been taken for the most widely used top level domain names, with a little bit of creativity we can still register an endless number of promising domain names.

While there is no clear indication to what extent .com, .net as well as country top level domain names such as .co.uk, .de, .fr and so forth influence search engine rankings of websites, the word is that .org domains are still favored by Google as part of the non-commercial tradition.

However, this article is not looking at how the domain extension influences the ranking of a website as this is thought to be insignificant for search engine rankings. A stronger influence on search engine rankings have indeed the length of registration, frequency of DNS changes as well as the reputation of the registrar.

Even though sometimes overrated in its importance - especially in relationship to its effect on search engine rankings, domain names do remain an important asset for the online corporate identity of your business.

The main consideration concerning your domain name will be to choose between a creative name (such as “yahoo”, “alibaba”, “kazaa”) or a keyword name (such as “study-tourism”, “retail-gifts” or “hawaii-mortgage-company”. In fact using main keywords in your domain name does have a positive effect on your search engine rankings, especially to get your rankings off the ground after launching a new website. Down the road the effect however becomes almost negligible.

While many people tend to register numerous domain names to accommodate most important key words within them, they overlook that Google and other major search engines will pay almost the same attention to sub-domains. So instead of registering “hawaii-real-estate”, “florida-real-estate” and so forth, we might as well just register “real-estate” and have sub domains such as “hawaii.real-estate”, “florida.real-estate” and so forth.

What people further underestimate is that search engines in general look for keywords in the URL (unique resource locator) which comprises of the top level domain, any potential sub-domains and of course the file name. So, if you happen to be using a creative domain name that does not contain any important key words, you can of course include your main keywords in the file name of the webpage itself, i.e. florida-real-estate.html.

Hence, in a nutshell, while domain names are a major asset for your corporate identity, their significance for search engine rankings is overrated, as there are various ways to accommodate significant keywords in the URL and eventually other onsite factors (coding techniques, content) of a website will have a greater impact for search engine rankings.

Svend Nelson is a university lecturer and Internet entrepreneur. He is an online marketing specialist active in various online industries; among his online presences in the real estate and home loan industry are Hawaii Real Estate Listings and Hawaii Home Loans. Svend also just started a blog sharing his experience about how to make money online. Svend lived and worked in various countries across Latin America, Europe and Asia before settling in Thailand.

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