Industry's First Anti-Spam Policy for Search Engine Abusers; .NU Domain Ltd Invokes Strong Policies Against Search Engine Spamers - Company Business and Marketing

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Sept 6, 1999

The .NU Domain Ltd, (www.nunames.nu) the fastest growing domain on the Internet, Tuesday announced the industry's first anti-spam policy aimed at users who abuse free search engine listings. The .NU Domain's aggressive policy promises to revoke without refund the .NU domain name of any customer that spams, floods or otherwise abuses free search engine listings.

Search engine spamming is a guerilla marketing tactic that is practiced by some rogue web sites. The process entails the regular submission of numerous web pages to search engines in order to show up repeatedly on the search engine's result pages. The usual technique is to submit multiple pages from the same central web site with many keywords, or with keywords unrelated to the real content of the pages. Some abusers also submit pages that present the search engine's spider with content that differs from what browsers will see.

"While these tactics may seem harmless on the outside, they are deceptive in intent and many times send innocent users to sites that they have no desire to visit," said J. William Semich, president of the .NU Domain Ltd. "Spamming, flooding, or otherwise abusing free search engine services constitutes theft of service and the .NU Domain Ltd will not condone use of .NU domain names in this manner."

According to the .NU Domain's anti-spam policy, any customer who spams or floods a search engines risks having his .NU domain name(s) revoked. Additionally the company will post on its web site any information provided by search engine service providers whose services have been abused.

"Free search engines listings exist for the use of the entire Internet community," continued Semich. "The flooding of these search engines has become so aggressive that it not only lowers the value of the resulting information from the search engines but more importantly many times directs folks to undesirable web sites."

.NU Domain Ltd., an US-based private corporation, offers the only competitive alternative to Network Solutions Inc.'s. (NASDAQ:NSOL) .com domain name. The .NU Domain Ltd. targets end users and the small office/home office (SOHO) market, as well as Internet users in countries with restrictions on the domain name registration process. The .NU domain is the fastest growing TLD on the Internet. It has registered nearly 46,000 .NU domain names on the Internet during the past 20 months and registrations of .NU domain names have doubled in the past six months.

Current .NU registered customers are located in dozens of counties throughout the world, including Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Norway, Italy, the UK, Spain, Brazil, New Zealand, Finland, Indonesia, Belgium, Singapore, France, the Canary Islands, Australia, Canada and the Philippines, as well as the US.

The list of registered .NU domain names ranges from personal sites like the Black Velvet Dart Team in Sweden at http://www.blackvelvet.nu to names registered by large corporations including Dell Computer Corporation at http://www.dell.nu, entertainment software publisher, Blizzard Entertainment at http://www.starcraft.nu, the Renault Group at http://www.renault.nu, International Data Group Corp. at http://www.idg.nu, The Coca-Cola Bottling Company at http://www.coca-cola.nu, and The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. at http://www.goodyear.nu.

.NU Domain Ltd also offers domain name parking services for customers who need to lock in a domain name but have no immediate plans to use it, the .NU InstantWeb Forwarding Service that provides URL forwarding for your .NU domain name to a GeoCities, Tripod or other Web site without a unique domain name, .NU InstantMail Forwarding so AOL, GeoCities, Hotmail and other mail service users can have a unique .NU mail address, and .NU InstantWeb Plus which is a complete Web package, including .NU Domain Name, Web Hosting or Web Forwarding and E-Mail forwarding capabilities. You can visit .NU Domain Ltd on the World Wide Web at http://www.nunames.nu.