Who is WHOIS and Why IS This Significant for a Real Estate Investor?

Who is WHOIS

If you are still using manual strategies to communicate with motivated sellers (bandit signs, postcards, form letter, etc.); when one gets acclimated to automation (Internet Marketing protocols) there is a tendency for "more means better" mentality; I am here to inform you that can backfire as "flames" a term that gets you blocked for unsolicited email and you earn the reputation of being a spammer...

Watch this informative video (hope it is not spam, LOL)

But seriously folks...as a savvy real estate investor / Internet Marketer is considering email as a tool for communicating with the motivated seller; "email blasting" can sometimes be construed as "spam" by the top search engines (e.g., Google, etc.). As a white hat specialist a title I gave myself to translate as an Internet Marketer having accountability and integrity; I often find individuals who use these rogue techniques as -- black hat strategies to generate large sums of money that borders on the unethical. One can say a white hat is a good guy and the black hat is the bad guy in simple terms. First allow me to introduce you to Wikipedia the online encyclopedia where this information is made available for you for free. Often times Gurus will talk about email blasting "letters" to individuals which is soliciting individuals without their permission which is considered spam and why you probably have a spam filter in your email account to block useless information.

Thus, a Black Hat SEO in computing is known as search engine spam, search engine poisoning, search spam or web spam) which is the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes to get a first-position in a search engine such as Google.

It involves a number of methods, such as repeating unrelated phrases, to manipulate the relevance or prominence of resources indexed in a manner inconsistent with the purpose of the indexing system. Unlike the SERP which is free from Google (already discussed in a previous blog).

It could be considered to be a part of search engine optimization (SEO) process though there are many search engine optimization methods that improve the quality and appearance of the content of web sites and serve content useful to many users.

Search engines use a variety of algorithms to determine relevancy ranking. Some of these include determining whether the search term appears in the body text or URL of a web page. These areas are where keywords can matched to use keyword marketing ( briefly introduced in another bog but more in a future blog... so stay tuned).

Many search engines check for instances of "spamdexing" and will remove suspect pages from their indexes. Also, people working for a search-engine organization can quickly block the results-listing from entire websites that use spamdexing, perhaps alerted by user complaints of false matches.

The rise of spamdexing in the mid-1990s made the leading search engines of the time less useful. Using unethical methods to make websites rank higher in search engine results than they otherwise would is commonly referred to in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry as "Black Hat SEO."

These methods are more focused on breaking the search engine promotion rules and guidelines referred to as a “loophole.” Not only this, there will be all that much risks for a website to get penalized from Google Panda and Google Penguin search results ranking algorithms.

Common spamdexing techniques can be classified into two broad classes: content spam (or term spam) and link spam. While there exists this corruption...know that every web site that has creditability would be registered with the WHOIS directory

What is the WHOIS directory?

WHOIS (pronounced as the phrase who is) is a query and response protocol that is widely used for querying databases that store the registered users or assignees of an Internet resource, such as a domain name, an IP address block, or an autonomous system, but is also used for a wider range of other information. The protocol stores and delivers database content in a human-readable format.[1] The WHOIS protocol is documented in RFC 3912.

History

When the Internet was emerging out of the ARPANET, there was only one organization that handled all domain registrations, which was DARPA itself. The process of registration was established in RFC 920. WHOIS was standardized in the early 1980s to look up domains, people and other resources related to domain and number registrations. As all registration was done by one organization at that time, one centralized server was used for WHOIS queries. This made looking up such information very easy.

Responsibility of domain registration remained with DARPA as the ARPANET became the Internet during the 1980s. UUNET began offering domain registration service; however they simply handled the paperwork which they forwarded to the DARPA Network Information Center (NIC). Then the National Science Foundationdirected that management of Internet domain registration would be handled by commercial, third-party entities. InterNIC was formed in 1993 under contract with the NSF, consisting of Network Solutions, Inc., General Atomics and AT&T. The General Atomics contract was canceled after several years due to performance issues.

20th century WHOIS servers were highly permissive and would allow wild-card searches. A WHOIS query of a person's last name would yield all individuals with that name. A query with a given keyword returned all registered domains containing that keyword. A query for a given administrative contact returned all domains the administrator was associated with. Since the advent of the commercialized Internet, multiple registrars and unethical spammers, such permissive searching is no longer available.

On December 1, 1999, management of the top-level domains (TLDs) com, net, and org was assigned to ICANN. At the time, these TLDs were converted to a thin WHOIS model. Existing WHOIS clients stopped working at that time. A month later, it had self-detecting Common Gateway Interface support so that the same program could operate a web-based WHOIS lookup, and an external TLD table to support multiple WHOIS servers based on the TLD of the request. This eventually became the model of the modern WHOIS client.

By 2005, there were many more generic top-level domains than there had been in the early 1980s. There are also many more country-code top-level domains. This has led to a complex network of domain name registrars and registrar associations, especially as the management of Internet infrastructure has become more internationalized. As such, performing a WHOIS query on a domain requires knowing the correct, authoritative WHOIS server to use. Tools to do WHOIS proxy searches have become common.

CRISP and IRIS

In 2003, an IETF committee was formed to create a new standard for looking up information on domain names and network numbers Cross Registry Information Service Protocol (CRISP).[2] Between January 2005 and July 2006, the working name for this proposed new standard was Internet Registry Information Service(IRIS) The initial IETF Proposed Standards RFCs for IRIS are:

The WHOIS directory is a public listing of domain names and the contact information for the people or organizations associated with each domain name. The WHOIS directory is used to determine the owner of a domain name. For example, when you register your domain, <your company>.com, the contact information you enter is included in a WHOIS directory listing for <your company>.com. Anyone can access the WHOIS directory to see who owns a particular domain (https://support.google.com/work/mail/answer/6233343).