Search Engine Optimization News Blog

There was a huge upset yesterday as the long awaited .me domains came up for sale through GoDaddy. Hundreds of would be domain buyers were thrilled to find their hoped for domain names were available, and paid on the spot for their chosen domains; then, it was all a big let down as the fateful emails began to arrive.

RIGISTRATION FAILED…

ERROR…

ALREADY REGISTERED…

Of course, the money is being refunded, but this is definitely not satisfactory to the hundreds of disgruntled customers who feel cheated out of their big chance at a really good domain name!

The high feeling run the gamut, from disdain to outrage to downright fury - rumors of foul play started flying immediately. There were angry accusations of fraud, particularly when it came to light that a GoDaddy VP had been bidding on after market domains.

Many GoDaddy customers have complained over the past months about logging on to buy a domain, and seeing that domain being bought out from under them within minutes - often by a name that appears to belong to GoDaddy itself.

These domains can later show up on auction sites priced at $1,000 or more, and will sit as a parked domain for years, inaccessible to the interested party.

So it begs the question, what happened here? Is GoDaddy an unethical company? Was there a purposeful misleading of customers? Or did their system just get overloaded as the gold rush began?

There is a lot of bad feeling over the issue, and it remains to be seen how GoDaddy is going to pacify the angry multitudes who are now vociferously stating their intent to find a new registrar.

It was to be expected that there would be stiff competition for certain domains. All the biggies - especially noted was ‘aweso.me’ - were snapped up but subsequent buyers will still allowed to plunk down money.

Should GoDaddy return the money with interest? That would seem fair. At least the hours spent slogging through the GoDaddy system fighting off aggressive upsell tactics at every turn would not have been completely wasted.

Too bad we can’t sue for mental and emotional stress. GoDaddy sure flubbed this one, right down the drain. Not good to tick off hundreds of potential customers!

I guess it will take a few weeks or months for everything to settle down and we can find out who actually owns what. Right now, ‘aweso.me’ has at least eight registered owners!