Warning! A Scary Story About Expired Domains

Please Share 🙂

A Shocking SurpriseDo you ever let domains expire? Especially domains that redirect to an affiliate link and that you have embedded in giveaway reports? Or maybe even in your Amazon books?

Better check them…

I just got a really nasty surprise…

I was editing one of my most popular giveaway reports, and came across a domain I wasn’t sure I still owned. So I checked it.

And I was horrified to discover that what popped up was a rather icky Japanese porn site, with an animated explicit scene. Yikes!

Somehow, it had never occurred to me that anything like that could happen, but there it was. And now I have to figure out how to eliminate as many instances of that domain as possible, and/or replace it with my NEW redirect domain.

Expired Domains Can Turn Into Nasty Surprises!

I’ve been letting quite a lot of domains expire over the last year or two, and several of them are redirect domains, embedded in giveaway books. Fortunately, most of the expired ones are in books that hardly anyone ever downloaded.

But still…

I have business cards with domains I no longer own. Better check what happened to those.

Expired Domains Trouble Shooting: Damage Control

So the first thing is to fix the special report, replace the one with the “bad” link, and then alert all my list members who own that report and send them the new and improved version.

Then, I have to check out all my blog posts to make sure that none of them includes THAT link.

Next, I have to check as many of the articles out there (I have more than 400 at Ezinearticles) and make sure none of them leads to that domain. Fortunately, most or all of them that would be relevant do lead to the free download…)

What else? There’s another place (which I won’t mention at this time) that also has a copy that’s accessible to the public. I’ll have to retrieve it and replace it with a new one.

I also have some products that might include this link – and have to find them all and replace them with the good link – and re-upload them.

Trouble-Shooting – Prevention of Future Problems

I will also have to go through my giveaway reports and check all expired domains… Hopefully, they have not turned into similar sites.

I’ll also have to check my other expired domains, at least those I actually used (and especially those I have on any old business cards) and make sure there’s no problem.

Finally, I will have to be more conservative when I create giveaway reports… And when I let domains expire.

And I need to keep better track of any domains I use as redirect links.

In fact, I’m currently in the process of reducing my holdings of domains. I have several hundred, and I’ve not made money with most of them, so if I can’t sell them, I’ll let them expire. But I’ll need to make sure that the expired ones aren’t going to come back to bite me.

A Lesson for YOU

If YOU have lots of domains and let them expire, you may want to watch for such problems too. I just wrote a post on a couple of the forums where I’m actively involved, and discovered that a LOT of expired domains seem to find a new life as a porn site.

So it’s a good idea to keep close tabs on your domains. And keep tabs on where you use them, so that you can “recall” them if you decide to let a domain go.

And if you do use them for redirects and publish them inside your giveaway reports, make sure to hang on to them.

You’d think the worst thing is that you have dead links in your ebooks, but as I discovered the hard way, that’s the least of my concerns!

You don’t know who the next owners might be, and you may not want to be associated with them.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.