Glossary

What is VERISIGN® DomainScoreTM ?

VERISIGN® DomainScoreTM is a free tool designed to aide and complement your pre-registration evaluation methodologies. Utilizing the techniques described below, Verisign computes NXD scores on a 1-10 scale (10 being best), to measure the reliability and quantity of DNS traffic for a given domain. However, DNS traffic does not always imply or correlate to web traffic. We hope you find these additional data metrics useful when deciding which domains to register.

What is NXD Traffic?

Second level Non-existent domain (NXD) traffic includes traffic to the top-level Domain (TLD) Name Servers (.com, .net, .tv, .cc) where either the second-level domain name being queried does not exist or the domain name does exist but does not properly have its DNS settings configured. The NXD traffic includes traffic from humans (e.g. type in traffic, clicking on a bookmark to a site that no longer exists, etc). But, every TLD's NXD traffic also includes machine traffic such as bots and search crawlers.

How does DomainScore utilize NXD traffic?

DomainScore continually evolves to optimize for "real" traffic from humans to better predict which second level domain names not currently registered will have the most valuable traffic when registered. To do this, we take into account not the just the sheer volume of total NXD traffic, but also things that have proven statistically to be predictors of a human generated traffic such as:

• Consistency of traffic over period of time – is the traffic consistent or going up and down with wild swings?
• Diversity of how many distinct recursive name servers are producing the traffic (a few or many?)
• A profile of the recursive name servers with relative weightings of how many clients are using those name servers; and
• Filtering out traffic from known spiders like search engines, and known bots