Thursday, October 22, 2009

FTD.com & FTDSUCKS.com

FTD.....in an effort to control their online reputation, just days ago bought FTDSUCKS.com. For those that may not know, FTDSUCKS.com was a rant website where users could submit their complaint stories. Over the last couple of years I have observed ftdsucks.com getting more search exposure.

Any way, what is a little humorous to me, is that they masked the FTDSUCKS.com domain over FTD.com instead of killing the domain. To see what I mean, go ahead and click here www.ftdsucks.com

Proof of registry. From the WhoIs database:

Registrant:
FTD Inc
3113 woodcreek Drive
Downers Grove, IL 60515
US

Domain Name: FTDSUCKS.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
FTD Inc
3113 woodcreek Drive
Downers Grove, IL 60515
US
630-724-6673

Record expires on 04-Aug-2010.
Record created on 06-Oct-2004.
Database last updated on 22-Oct-2009 23:11:26 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

NS1.FTDI.COM 208.13.72.9
NS2.FTDI.COM 208.49.170.8

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I tried the domain, but it looks like they pulled the plug. Was it masked (ftdsucks.com displaying ftd.com content) or redirected?

This is a pretty common ORM strategy, buying up domain names that could be detrimental to your brand. I bet FTD wishes they had paid a bit more attention to their online rep before the rant site was built in the first place :)

Mark McFall said...

Still works on my end. Try doing a site command in Google to see it. e.g. site:www.ftdsucks.com

Unknown said...

Ahh... they've masked the www subdomain to anniversaryflower.com.

However, they neglected the root domain without the www. Steller DNS job, FTD tech :)

Daman Anand said...

The question here is, why did the owner of domain(FTD hater) sold this domain to FTD?