Since the beginning of the Internet, the ability to view who owns a domain name has been vital for those selling and buying domains.

And come May 25th, we’re forever losing this critical staple of information the domain industry, domain investors, and general public have become quite fond of depending upon: Whois Data.

If you haven’t heard about General Data Protection Regulation policy, as known as GDPR, and it’s impact on the domain industry and domain investors by now, then you’ve likely been asleep at the wheel. WAKE UP!

We’re less than a few weeks away from the arrival of GDPR and it’s wide-reaching impact on personal and business brands throughout the world.

And although how we live and do business online will forever be transformed by GDPR, there 5 actions to consider that I believe believe should help to prepare and weather the arrival of GDPR.

A few weeks ago, I shared some thoughts pertaining to GoDaddy making strides updating the user experience for auction landing pages.

I recently discovered another intriguing feature recently added to auction landing pages for GoDaddy Closeout Auctions.

If you’ve not heard about the shot around the world known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and all it impacts, then where have you been?

GDPR is now less than a month away (May 25, 2018), and has greatly impacted a number of entities, both personal and business, worldwide, especially domain registrars.

What is looming in growing uncertainty is how ICANN will respond accordingly to the impact of GDPR on Whois services — which are used by a number of registries, registrars, domain investors and the general public to conduct business on a daily.

It’s been almost 6 years ago that Google forever altered the search landscape when it released an Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update — a filter launched to prevent low quality websites from ranking well simply because their domains had words or phrases that matched search terms.

This update wiped and hijacked search rankings for a number of websites overnight. One day websites were receiving hundreds and thousands of visitors, while the very next day was a handful of visitors, if any.

And although many website and website owners were impacted by Google’s EMD Update, there were a select few that weathered the storm without issue. In fact, some websites experienced increased search ranking.

One of those websites not impacted by Google’s EMD Update was an educational website dedicated to instructing and creating Java tutorials so easy, a 10 year old could do it.

A few days ago, I was bouncing between Chrome tabs checking GoDaddy’s expiring domain auctions, email, and GoDaddy’s Hosting Manager.

All was working well until I encountered a pesky 400 Bad Request error as I attempted to access GoDaddy’s Hosting Manager using Chrome.

It’s hard to believe it’s been just over a year since the debuting of DomainSherpa’s Emoji Domains May Take Over the World, having originally aired April 10, 2017.

In short, emoji domains caught fire shortly after Mike Cyger interviewed Matan Israeli and Jon Roig about a universal language that most people throughout the world use day — 6 billion emoji and stickers are sent in 45 billion messages daily per Forbes.

In addition to the interview, Cyger also produced a MUST-READ emoji domain guide: The Definitive Guide to Emoji Domains — a guide including first-ever registered emoji domain names, personal and business brands that own and use emoji domains, and a growing list of up-to-date emoji domains sales.

In my opinion, this interview was the match that lit the fuse for the emoji domain rocket ship ride experience thus far. 🚀

It’s not likely that another emoji domain interview will surface over at DomainSherpa. That said, I decided to take a moment to reflect over the latest happenings since the airing of the DomainSherpa episode, covering the following:

Today’s tutorial is likely to be well received after .WS made emoji domains available for the newly released Unicode Emoji v11 earlier this month.

If you were one of the few emoji domain investors to stake claim to a newly released emoji as an emoji domain name, then consider yourself fortunate. 🤩

If you didn’t move quickly enough or didn’t know how to convert Unicode to Punycode, then you’ll want to pay close attention and keep reading. 🧐

You’re likely wondering how did folks register emoji domains using Unicode version 11 Emoji when they’ve not yet been released to devices, right? 🤔

I’ll answer this question by sharing with you two ways to convert Unicode to Punycode. This should allow you to hopefully get and keep a step ahead in the emoji domain game as new Unicode Emoji versions are released.