At the time I made the comment on SEO Book:

The only way you could rank for that term quickly would be to take on tonnes of clients and use footer links in all of their sites, massive nepotistic linking or massive link buying. I don’t see him taking on seo clients, and option 2 & 3 are pretty much ruled out due to the fact he’s making a public spectacle of the attempt to rank.
…
The only chance I give him is if he is planning to 301 his personal site to the new one, since it already ranks first page.

It seems he went the route of  the only chance of success I was giving him, by 301′ing PatrickGavin.com to SearchEngineOptimization.net. This of course lead to his original site dropping out of the results completely (it was originally ranking 7th).

Publicly announcing you are going to rank first for that term, then attempting to do it by 301′ing an existing established site into a $60k domain was always filled with danger.  He was setting his stall out for Google to make an example of him, and it looks like they done it as he has been forced to undo the 301 due to a complete lack of rankings.  Now his site simply says

SearchEngineOptimization.net has gone offline. We will be back soon!

Was anyone expecting much Google love to the man publicly announcing his plans with this, given that he built, ran and sold the largest public text link sales network?

According to a thread on Acorn Domains, the seller is apparently trying to back out of the deal:

So I want to share with you the news that I have just been informed by Sedo that the seller is disputing the auction and claims the name had not been authorised to be sold. I don’t know the precise circumstances yet but will find out.

With the reasonable amount of publicity this listing and sale received, this is the last thing Sedo needs – the amount of publicity is only going to get bigger if this sale is dragged into a court room. If big ticket sellers see Sedo not enforcing what is a legally binding contract, then I see no reason for them to continue handing them a 10% commission for very little.

Sedo have a history of washing their hands of transactions when either a buyer or seller refuse to complete, so it will definitely be interesting to see how this pans out.

The following is purely my own opinion, not confirmed as fact. It looks to me that the seller did authorise the sale of the domain, but got cold feet after it ended at significantly less than they expected.

The domain industry was full of people talking about the sale in the first place, since a bid on Sedo sent it to public auction. I cannot believe that someone who owns a domain like “mobilephones.co.uk” wouldn’t have came across news that it was for sale and immediately raised the alarm that the sale was bogus.

The nameservers of the domain are set to Sedo parking,  and the .com of the same domain are listed for sale, again on Sedo.  Honestly, when you look at all of this together, combined with the fact phones.co.uk sold for £175k, and 6 figure offers have been turned down for mobilephones.co.uk in the past, I am betting on this one being a case of the seller simply changing their mind when they seen the ending price.

The obvious solution to end situations like this arising in the first place would be for Sedo to take control of high value domains as the auction starts. If the domain meets the reserve (which it did in this case), then Sedo process the payment and pass on the domain, leaving absolutely no chance of people just deciding they no longer fancy the legally binding agreement they signed up to.

It will be interesting to see what site (if any) appears on this in the coming weeks. I think this would have been an excellent buy for one of the mid level players. Not one of the main networks, but one of the bigger resellers with tv/newspaper exposure such as Dialaphone etc.

One thing about the auction – I think it was a particularly poor idea to have the auction ending at around midnight UK time – surely Sedo should have put the auction forward/back to end in the middle of the business day in the UK?

The largest previous sale for a .org domain was engineering.org for $198,000 (and is currently 301′ing to what could be called a low value .info domain!)

It will be interesting to follow the site development on poker.org, as well as its journey through the rankings to page 1 in Google for “poker”.

I would expect them to follow the design and link building of their other similar properties, blackjack.org and craps.net.

We had a domain with them, they emailed us to renew it which we done with Paypal. They are refusing to answer emails, and if you click the support tab on their site all it says is

Great Success
Apache is working on your cPanel and WHM™ Server

So there is absolutely no way to contact them, my domain is going to go through the expiry process then be caught by someone else because it has pagerank and lots of links…

Avoid Dotstrar.com as they will effectively steal your site and domain.