There are often odd terms thrown about in the web hosting and web development worlds that just don’t make any sense the the common man on the street. Phil drops me in an e-mail asking…
“What is domain kiting? I have heard it is related somewhat with domain deletion and AdSense from Google. Do you know anything else about the process?”
What is Domain Kiting All About?
Domain Kiting is one of those terms that seems a ‘bit odd when your first hear it, but I promise it does make a little ‘bit of sense. Think of it as you trying to fly a kite, it says up for a while then falls. Then you put it back up in the air, fly it some more and you do this till you get bored. In the domain name world kiting is the process of deleting a domain name during the 5 day grace period and then re-registering it for another 5 day grace period, and so on and so forth. Then you just wash, rinse, repeat.
How Does it Happen?
The reason for the 5 day grace period on domain registrations is to cover the customer just in case they misspell it, or decide they don’t want it. As you can see though, this makes it very easy for scammers to play the system to their advantage. Now these days domain name registers like GoDaddy and the like are becoming smarter to the process. This process doesn’t really take advantage or hurt the honest users out there, it just cheats the proverbial domain name “man”.
How Do They Make Money?
Now I noticed you also mentioned something about Google. Here recently Google has said their AdSense program will be looking for domains that are “kiting” and drop these domains from being able to put AdSense ads up on those domains. Hopefully by ending the chance to earn a buck – they hope to curb the bad guys from trying the domain kiting all together.
