Monday, November 3, 2008

404 - Stop Sylvia

1. Stop Sylvia
It should be noted that the old Stop Sylvia Browne domain name expired while site-administrator, Robert Lancaster, was in the hospital. A suspected domain broker immediately purchased the name and is offering it back for $20,000...

Therefore, the entire site has been moved to stopsylvia.com.

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2 comments:

JD said...

are domain brokers shrewd businessmen (or women) or are they just dicks?

Christopher Clark said...

I guess you can't pigeonhole all of them like that. This guy however seems like kind of a dick. His mode of operation is to sit around waiting for a domain with a high google rank to expire and then pounce on it before the legitimate owners can renew. Then he can put advertising on a site that he know will get a lot of page hits.

In this case the Lancasters decided not to deal with him and just registered a new domain. A group of supported have been asking bloggers and website owners to change their links to the new Sylvia Browne site, stopsylvia.com, in order to raise its google rank, while lowering the rank of the old site, making it pretty much valueless.

Right now the new site shows up as the third result of a Sylvia Browne google search, below her official site and her wikipedia entry. I didn't see the old, hijacked site anywhere within the first 10 pages of results. So it seems like the campaign has worked pretty well.