eNom has acquired BulkRegister, LLC in a deal that combines providers that focus on high-volume customers. BulkRegister, which had been owned by hosting company Alabanza, manages more than 1.5 million domains for its 35,000 customers. eNom said the acquisition gives it more than 6.8 million domain names under management, allowing it to pass Network Solutions to become the second-largest registrar after Go Daddy.

“We are excited about this significant and synergistic addition to our domain platform,” said Paul Stahura, founder and chief executive officer of eNom. “Both eNom and BulkRegister have built up strong, loyal and successful customer bases, by providing great tools, high quality service, and a solid technology platform. The combination of the two companies is a natural fit.”

Boing Boing is usually a great read, but this week’s item on domain name kiting and the add-grace period (AGP) wasn’t its best work. The practice - which Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow called a “new online scam” - has been widely discussed for more than a year (see July 2005 post at Netcraft, among others that mention the practice), and has since been written about by the Internet Stock Blog and Joi Ito (a prominent friend of Boing Boing), among many others.

Domain incubation is a new strategy in which domain owners “outsource” their site management to a third-party service that provides content and link-building support. Internet domain incubation differs from parking in that it doesn’t generate revenue, but can improve a domain’s resale value by improving its Google rank and the number of incoming links.

It’s been 18 months since Google became a domain registrar, a move that initially shook up the domain and hosting businesses amid the notion that Google might make domain names available for free. Before long, Google watchers advanced an alternate theory: that Google would use its access to the list of recently sold domains to clean up its search results, resetting a site’s PageRank when its domain changes hands.

That theory has now been confirmed, thanks to the sharp-eyes of Kevin Murphy at Texturbation, who noted comments by Google employee (and ICANN chair) Vint Cerf in the recent domain marketplace discussion at ICANN’s conference in Marrakech. Here’s the cogent excerpt (from a much longer transcript):