Porn Sites: Forgot to renew your domain, eh?

There’s this little known underground economy for domaineers that’s very, very lucrative. In one of our discussions the other night at the SEO Philippines party, there’s this one guy from down south who snatched up the .COM of a tri-media popular .COM.PH website — within months, he was allegedly earning USD$6,000 per month from Adsense for domains. Lucky guy (if my guess was right, he used to link/comment to this blog).

Ok, going back to the topic of porn sites snatching up expired domains. A classic example of which is my friends popular blog awards site — the Philippine Blog Awards. I won’t link to it since you’ll end up to a landing page for a porn site. See, he got tired of running the site and decided to let go of it. I told him he should have passed it on to me because the awards was a good way of promoting Filipino blogs. He just forgot about it and moved on.

Now, since the awards was on for about 3 years and every year around 500 or so blogs enter the contest, you’d expect it to have a lot of linkbacks. There are also linked badges still being posted by previous winners. That’s foot traffic right there and then. And for a nifty $9PHP 528INR 763EUR 9CNY 66 a month, the porn site owners got a huge bargain for it.

So, if you still have links back to that website somewhere in your archives, please pull them off. And the next time you want to let go of a domain, try and ask a friend or someone you trust if they want it (you can ask me too!). At least, it won’t go and serve some viagra, poker, texas holdem or porn sites.