Ultsearch.com Active In .eu

Ultsearch.com and mostwanteddomains.com are active in .eu ccTLD. With the recent court order by a Belgian court, it seems that “direct navigation” networks have gained some element of legitimacy in .eu ccTLD. The Ovidio syndicate managed to convince the court that it was not a warehousing operation but rather a direct navigation network. These “direct navigation” networks rely on type-in traffic and just serve pages of PPC adverts to users landing on the pages.

A number of these link are already operating within the .eu ccTLD and EURid has not taken any action against them. Some of the biggest players in the US market are active in the .eu ccTLD. They have used front companies to register hundreds of thousands of .eu domains for their networks. EURid seems completely obvlivious to the way that these firms have bought up huge swathes of .eu ccTLD in order to turn them into PPC linkswamps.

Marchex bought the Hong Kong Ultsearch.com operation some time ago. Recent research shows that ultsearch.com it has over 3493 .eu domains hosted and it picked up transfers from tempusenterprises.com in the last few months. Some of those Ultsearch domains are registered by what appears to be an Irish front company. In the past few months, ultsearch.com gained some domains from the Tempus Enterprises Limited (another UK front company) nameservers.

Michael Berkens’ mostwanteddomains.com has also been busy. His UK front companies have snagged at least 532 .eu domains but it failed to get malls.eu despite a Benelux trademark.

Another “direct navigation” network that used UK front companies (apparently Swiss owned) has over 43371 .eu domains hosted on Romanian hoster xss.ro and in Romanian IP space. This operation has registered domains such as waterfordcastle.eu, creativeireland.eu and historyireland.eu eventhough it has no connection with Ireland. It is quite plainly a squatter that has registered the .eu variant of many existing website domains.

The damage to .eu ccTLD of having so much of .eu turned into PPC pages is quite obvious to everyone but the management of EURid. Now the .eu ccTLD is little more than a pale imitation of .info or .biz gTLDs. Any registrations by businesses in .eu have been protective and there have been no big pureplay .eu websites yet.

Written by John McCormac on October 7th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Joachim Weiß
#1. October 25th, 2006, at 3:51 PM.

More on the domaingrabbing activities -> Tempusenterprises.eu

Joachim