If you’ve ever gone to a wine tasting, you know how important it is to try something before you actually buy a few bottles. Like a wine tasting, a process known as “domain tasting” allows web site developers to register a domain name and use a five-day grace period to determine if the domain name is effective for search engine rankings. If the domain name turns out to be ineffective, it can be cancelled. The registration fee will then be refunded.
The Advantages of Domain Tasting
Domain name tasting is a good method for those with limited funds to determine where their money would be best spent online. Buying domains without going through a “domain tasting” process can be risky, with search engines treating each domain differently based on the content of the second level domain. In addition to this, a domain that has been registered before may be treated either very poorly or very well by search engines depending on what its former owner did with it.
When a domain is registered, the registrant has a five-day window during which the registrant is able to cancel the domain and obtain a refund.
During the grace period, the new owner of the domain will put the domain name through its paces, checking to see where the site appears in the search engine results as well as the number of ad impressions and overall visitor traffic. It can be a great way to see if your business will make a splash online and live up to its potential.
However, the the majority of domains that are cancelled were not purchased by people creating new web sites. Indeed, the most common practice is to register hundreds or thousands of domain names at once and check each of them to see how much traffic they generate. So-called “successful” domains, which generally survive the domain tasting process and are not refunded, are those which misspell popular domain names.
This tendency to register misspellings of popular domains and exploit the success of other online companies, as well as prey on users who make a simple typo, is what has earned the practice a bad reputation. ICANN is considering some regulatory changes which, if successful, would reduce the viability of the domain tasting process.
Ethical Questionability
Domain name tasting, when it takes advantage of users who make a common typo while trying to reach another website, is largely considered malicious and exploitative. Depending on the registrant’s intentions — which can range anywhere from displaying advertisments to distributing harmful malware — the hundreds or thousands of domain names they register at once can degrade the quality of the internet.
To combat this practice, ICANN has proposed not refunding part of the fee (up to 20 cents per domain name). The refund of the larger cost of registering a domain (which can go as high as $15 per domain in some cases) would remain intact; the aim is to avoid punishing the average webmaster who wishes to “taste” a domain or simply makes a mistake in registering a domain.
The aim of the process is to charge the 20 cent fee to webmasters who purchase hundreds or thousands of domain names at once, and then demand refunds for all of them. Consider that 1,000 refunded domains would still cost the webmaster $200, and you can see why the idea of buying a lot of domains to cherry pick the best ones becomes less desirable.
However, domain tasting is still a great process for someone who is simply looking to gauge the effectiveness of one or two domain names. For online businesses that rely on high search rankings, domain tasting is a good way to see how the website will perform on various search engines. For blog owners, a grace period is invaluable for determining ad impressions and revenue levels.
If you’re not a scammer, you shouldn’t be concerned about domain tasting. It’s a legitimate use and benefit of ICANN’s five-day refund policy for new domain names.