Tanith - 12:00 am on Jun 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

Oh if you didn't know what rife meant and looked it up at dictionary.com _ I hope you didn't mis-spell dictionary and replace the 'a' with an 'e'

Let's take a really popular social media domain such as twitter.com and look at how type squatting works.

Take a look at your keyboard - take the letter 't' at the start of twitter.com there are 5 adjacent letters 'r', 'f', 'g', 'h' and 'y'

All of the domains where the first t in twitter is replaced with one of these letters is parked (or has been parked and the services discontinued)

The one using the g was blocked by Sedo - the others are still all live. (Though Sedo do need to get their act together and block the 'h' and 'y' variants)

Now do the same with the 'w' - the adjacent letters are 'q','a','s','d' and 'e' - you get very similar results parked pages plus affiliate links to major corporation sites.

-As an exercise the reader can test the adjacent letters for the other letters in twitter.com (let me know if you find one where there isn't a typo squat - okay don't bother with that just register the domain and park it somewhere and make some money --I haven't already done it because it's not my style)

The real question is can a service like internettraffic.com or sedo.com survive without this kind of typo traffic?

Do they have the guts to create a spider and take the top 100,000 sites from Alexa and do some automated checking of whether the adjacent letter typos for these sites show their parking pages or not?

Will the PPC companies feeding their results give them credit for this and give better payouts to those companies that keep the typo squatters out?