I haven’t talked much about SnapNames.com after all the shill bidding news broke nor have I visited the site all that much either. I guess I wasn’t confident in who I would be bidding against and my account has stayed empty for back orders and I have not bid on any auctions.

I was a little bored today and thought I would checkout what is on the auction block for domain names over at Snapnames (expired). They have some nice ones that I wanted to back order since I feel a little bit better about SnapNames but nothing from them has built in that much trust but when I started looking at the "Backorder By" dates, I was like WTF?

If you click on the Advanced Search link from the homepage, you will see the most backordered domains with the highest amount of bids first etc. Well, CMOS.com happens to be the first listed with 158 backorders. The problem, the backorder by date is 15-Dec-2009. Ahhh that was like 13 days ago.

I know the dates they display are "Estimates" but they are also normally very accurate. Secondly, if you see dates "before" today’s date, you only likely see a couple from time to time.

Well, a large portion of the domains displayed on the default Advanced Search page are domains that are past the Backorder By date. Actually, only 2 of the top 10 most backordered domains have dates that are correct (past today’s date).

The above 2 highlighted show the domains that technically have dates that you can backorder the domain and it would likely go to auction, with the vast majority of other domains that will never go to auction. You keep running into more and more domains as you go down the inventory list as well that are past the backorder by dates. Some domains listed even date back to November 2009.

You can still backorder the domain names, but again, it is very unlikely these domains will ever go to auction this year.

It’s a pain in the ass going through large lists of domain names to decide which ones you would like to backorder etc, but it makes it a bigger pain in the ass when the majority of domain names listed on a major service will never even go to auction. The end result will be that you are wasting your time by placing a backorder on a domain name that really shouldn’t still be listed. It’s like false advertising really.

One would really think that SnapNames has things in place to remove domains a short time after the backorder by date is past or is renewed but clearly something is up and is allowing all these domains to be listed. It makes me wonder if anybody is watching things over at Snap as one would think that this would be something they would catch.