Why listings are masked
How listing masking protects your domains and pricing from catalog scrapers, and why serious buyers always see your listings in full.
If you have heard that some advertisers see marketplace listings with the domain name hidden, this page explains what that is and why it works in your favor. Short version: masking protects your catalog data and your pricing, and it never hides you from buyers who actually spend.
What masking is
Advertisers on a free account see listings with the domain name, URL, and description hidden. Everything a buyer needs to judge quality stays visible: metrics, price, category, and country. Free advertisers can permanently reveal a limited number of listings (10 per week), and any domain they have ordered from or been offered stays visible to them forever.
Nothing changes for you as a seller: your own domains are always fully visible to you in My Domains, and your listings appear normally in search and browse results.
Why we mask
Public link marketplaces get scraped. Competitors and resellers harvest catalogs to copy domain lists, undercut prices, or approach your sites directly outside the platform. Masking removes the payoff: a scraper without a paid account cannot match a price to a domain name, so your catalog and your rates cannot be bulk-copied.
In short, masking protects your pricing power.
Serious buyers see everything
Masking only applies to free, anonymous browsing. The buyers who matter see your listings in full:
- Marketplace Pro subscribers: buyers paying $5/month for full marketplace access.
- Paid monitoring customers: every LinkWatcher plan from Freelancer up includes Pro automatically.
- Your existing buyers: anyone who has ordered from you, or received an offer from you, sees those domains forever.
Automated scraping and bulk collection of listing data are also prohibited by the marketplace Terms of Use, including through paid accounts, and violations lead to account termination.
Featured listings are always visible
If you feature a listing, it is shown unmasked to everyone, including free advertisers. That is part of what featuring buys: maximum exposure to the entire buyer audience, not just paying subscribers.
Note: You do not need to do anything. Masking is applied automatically by the platform and requires no changes to your listings.