After letting so many domain names expire or having sold so many off cheaply, today I was faced with deciding which to prune and which to keep.

Given the fact that most are no longer suitable for my core business, I let 75% of the renewal list go and kept those listed below – yes, most on this list are hyphenated, but are also extremely strong key word domains suitable for their obvious niches:

• Recruitment-Agent.com
• Nursing-Recruitment.com
• IndependentMedicals.com
• IT-Recruiters.com
• Private-Care.com
• Legal-Recruiter.com

I would also point out that I have never failed in getting any of my sites to the top of Google and search engines using hyphenated names, so for the nay-sayers out there, my experience gained over 20 years (wow, it doesn’t seem that long, but yes, 1993 was when I registered my first domain), has demonstrated the opposite of what certain people preach.

Of course, a non-hyphenated .com will take traffic from the hyphenated, but not always to the degree that you might think.

When I started out all those years ago, I was involved in a recruitment business, hence the recruitment theme. I bought what I knew and to this day, I still do.

Any of those names can be acquired at reasonable cost, apart from IndependentMedicals.com which is too big a niche to let go cheaply. But, if you’re interested, please get in touch.

ON another note, thanks again to SnapNames, they managed to grab Ben-Carter.com for my youngest son today, so that’s made him and me quite happy.

The ease of email and the Internet means that just about every retailer you visit now asks for a brief customer satisfaction survey from you, sometimes even after just a visit to their premises.

It’s driving me mad and has done for a while now.

After getting my car serviced, I was called by the manufacturer on two separate occasions asking how satisfied I was. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a problem to me, but given that I specifically requested that they don’t call me when I dropped the car off, I feel justified in my annoyance.

The same is true of all car dealers now. Visit one and arrange a test drive and from that point on, it’s survey after survey.

Grocery and general retail shopping is going the same way now too, with retailers offering all kind of incentives to get your point of view on their service and wanting to know how their staff did today.

Of course, by answering, you ultimately end up on their email list – which is one reason I always politely refuse to take part. I just don’t believe that these things have anything to do with improving customer service and have everything to do with selling me more stuff.

I do think it’s important to let companies know when they suck though, but I don’t believe that this should involve me wasting my time rating crap on a scale of one to ten. Heck, if I’m unhappy I have a blog to sound off on, which does bring results. The name I was trying to transfer on a previous entry has now miraculously transferred. No comment from NamesBeyond though and, thankfully, no customer service questionnaire!

It’s been a couple of years since I made a conscious decision to move away from domain names and more importantly, to stop making the impulse purchases.

Since then, I must have let a few hundred go – either selling them or in many cases, simply letting them expire.

Now to some in the domain game, this approach might seem like complete folly, but there was a reason for doing it and it had nothing to do with renewal fees.

I run a business and needed to focus my efforts on that entirely. The domains became a distraction because each time I received a renewal notification, it would send me off on a tangent, looking for something to do with the name, except of course, it never was just one name, it was several. And this was happening daily. Perhaps that’s a great reason for parking them, but even so, it’s not my way to do that.

This month, I’ve gone a step further in reducing the clutter by deleting more than 150 web sites that were built along the way as I collected more and more names.

My hosting account now looks considerably tidier and I now have 150+ less sites to administer and worry about.

The money that these sites were generating in Adsense etc., was insignificant anyway and the Internet is now less cluttered as a consequence of my actions. Who needs mini-sites anyway?

So now, I have less than a dozen sites and only one or two are non-core business.

I feel a lot better as a consequence. De-cluttering is just as important online as it is offline.