Which mispellings to register?

How do you decide?

[ergophobe]

So I have bluewidgets.com as my main domain. Obviously, it's a good idea to get

bluewidgets.net, .org, perhaps a few others.
blue-widgets.com with a hyphen.

How do you decide on others
bluwidgets?
bluewidgest?

just to cite two types that I made just in writing this post. Obviously, your server logs are of no use. Do you just use your own typing errors? Do you ask ten people to type your domain as fast as possible and send you the results?

Tom

[vkaryl]

ergophobe, do you think it's that serious a situation? Nope - not being snide, just asking, because every time I've mis-typed/misspelled a google entry in the last six months or so, it's offered me sometimes several other options, depending on whichever "misspelling algo" it's using at the time.

You might go for more esoteric oddities rather than the common ones that google at least can probably catch. In fact, you might just try typing misspellings into the google search box and see what happens.

[zomega42]

Try checking your logs for the search engine phrases people are using to find your site. Even if someone types in "blue widgest", google will find sites that only talk about "blue widgets" it seems -- go ahead and try it, see if your site pops up. Then you can use the misspellings from google as a guide.

[buckworks]

I think it's wise to have control of predictable variations and misspellings of your own domain name, especially if you plan to do a lot of offline advertising. It's cheap insurance to protect your brand/trademark.

Depending on the nature of your business, you might also want to make sure that names such as "companynamesucks.com" are under your control as well.

[Teknorat]

He's not talking about google he's talking about people who have heard or read the url somewhere and then misspell it because they don't know how or they typed too quickly. One thing to note is that the top line of the keyboard seems to be mis-typed most often. Most people will actually add in an extra character on accident. If this is the case I think most would notice it and fix. The plural 's' being swopped with the second last letter is a good one. That and missing letters. Getting some people to type it in a few times is probably a good idea. Another thing to note are differences in spelling ie. widgets-center.com and widgets-centre.com both are the correct spelling depending on where you are.

:)

[ergophobe]

Yup, buckworks and tekno are more in line with my thinking. Not worried about search engines. I'm thinking of people making the transition from verbal to written. Zomega's idea would at least give some indication of which ones to target. I'll keep that in mind.

In essence, if the user makes a typo such that they get dead space ("www.domain1324safd.com could not be found") or zero hits on google, that doesn't bother me. They'll see their typo and try again. I'm thinking brand protection, trademark protection, that sort of thing.

Widgets wasn't the best example. I'm thinking of words that people might genuinely mispell, or for which there are homonyms or obvious typos, like buckworks' example of "centre" versus "center" or say "capital/capitol" or, for the worse spellers out there, even genuine spelling errors such as "sentinel/sentinal".

If I had a nursery in the state capitol called "capitol-growers" I would definitely want "capital-growers" even if some folks might think it was an investment firm. But if I had "sentinel-growers" on Sentinel Ave, I'm not sure I would want "sentinal-growers" (sentinel-grower, perhaps). What I wouldn't want is a competitor to go and register "capital-growers" or "sentinal-growers" just because I was too cheap to drop a hundred bucks a year on some good variants. If they did great PR and were highly ranked in Google, I could face a situation where the Google spelling algo would work against me. Someone types in "Sentinel Growers" and Google comes back with "Did you mean Sentinal Grower?"

That's an extreme example, sure, but that's more where I was headed with the question.

[vkaryl]

I see. Y'know, so much stuff herein is related ONLY to SEs etc. that it's far too easy to ignore everything else....

[suzyvirtual]

wwwbluewidgets.com and, if you have alot of traffic coming from people typing your domain name in (like millions per month), then wbluewidgets.com too. for some reason people hardly mess up do wwbluewidgets.com though.

[ergophobe]

That's tricky - I wouldn't have thought of that though I've typed in roughly that URL hundreds of times.

[datadame]

I used to manage a site that had a name with a hyphen in it, and ended in .net. Using your example, it was blue-widget.net. I was forever fielding complaints that the site was down or pointing to the wrong place, only to find out that the user had made one of the same group of errors over and over, when entering the URL.

Finally, I registered...

bluewidget.com

bluewidget.org

bluewidget.net

blue-widget.com

blue-widget.org
...and redirected them all to blue-widget.net. The complaints dropped to zero. Happier clients for the princely sum of $45/year at the time. It works if you can get the variations on the name.