Does anybody have any experience where a competitor buys your domain .net, .org or other .thing and puts a site up? I noticed somebody purchased my domain .something and put up some strange site with links pointing to other businesses they had. Anybody have an idea of what the point of that would be?
If they are a non-profit I tend to advise to buy the .org and .com ...if the .com is gone, I don't like to buy the .org and the other way around.
This is to avoid confusion later with email etc. basically I try to take the .org and .com for non-profits and .com for private parties. Mainly because .com is what is most remembered by the consumer...
J
IMHO dont mind with the secondary extensions (like .info, .biz, .tv, .blahblah...)
[edited by: nsqlg at 6:16 pm (utc) on Dec. 2, 2005]
If it's a good niche keyword phrase domain name and I want to lock out competitors, yeah.
Sometimes they're not as important to me and I don't.
1) I figure that if the site really takes off I'll have enough money to bribe/battle with a squatter if necessary.
2) And if someone actually does develop a site at the .org, .tv, or .whatever I will inevitably benefit from the traffic since everyone still naturally tries .com or .net first.
3) I don't want to encourage "them" to keep creating new extensions just to make people spend more money to cover their bases.
Freq---
.info is spammer/MFA heaven and .biz is for ebay stores run out of some guy's basement...
Sometimes if you're a heavily branded domain, though, you want those to keep tacky competitors from using them. For a distinctive brand in a competitive area, I usually prod a well-branded client, if they can afford it, to get .com, .net, and maybe .info, .biz, and .us.
The problem, though, is knowing where to stop on other variants. Eg, suppose the client is widgetworld.com. I usually suggest they also get the hyphenated versions, widget-world.com and widget-world.net. I'll usually stop with those two, but I'm curious about what others think.
The foreign variants can also be important, at least for some clients that might ultimately go international, or not want others to go international with the same name.
Additionally, there are plural variants. ;) Eg, right now, I have several clients that are in the form brandnamewidget.com, but who don't own brandnamewidgets.com and wish they did. I suggest you pounce on single and plural variants if they apply. Lots of chance for confusion on these. Probably you should just stop on the .com and .net versions of these... and maybe the same for the hyphenates.
J
I was running a .org site with a busy forum. When I bought the domain, the .com and .net were already bought -- the .com was somebody's personal page, the .net was an ISP. Figured no problem and no confusion there.
Weeeeellll ... the ISP went under and the .net domain was bought by a porn operator. AND Google would rank the porn operator above my domain when people entered keywords that they thought would lead them to my site. I think the porn operator had some meta tags that were put in deliberately to cause that. Led to more than a little confusion and embarassment, particularly when it was, say, coworkers who visited "my" site and found obnoxious nudies.
Leva
I have felt more need to register the .com version of plurals, alternate (e.g. British) spellings, hypenated versions, etc. Even foreign language translations of my site name in one instance. If you start multiplying all that out by the number of possible suffixes, it can become ridiculous.
widgetwidget.com
widgetwidgets.com
widget-widget.com
widget-widgets.com
widgetwidget.net
widgetwidgets.net
widget-widget.net
widget-widgets.net
widgetwidget.org
widgetwidgets.org
widget-widget.org
widget-widgets.org
plus whatever else takes your fancy :)
I can't imagine how much of domain buying/tracking work big companies like Microsoft must put in.
and just as others have pointed out, I did a search the other day and found mydomain.com as my-domain.com
I just went and bought my-domain.net and my-domain.org, that'll teach those ******** for taking my-domain.com
what do you do with the two you aren't using
I bought a domain for a new UK business recently. Because of the amount of investment in the business I thought it prudent to buy various competitive domains and misspellings. Without going overboard I ended up with in excess of one hundred .com, .net, .org, and .co.uk domains. I didn't bother with other TLDs
A true professional :) I can understand that that investment is a pittance when compared to the total investment. Well worth the investment. (I mean it, no intended sarcasm)
1) .com , .net, .org, .info, .biz, .us (if you are a us citizen)
2) If you target UK then .org.uk, .co.uk
3) If your have some other country traffic then major 2 variations of your country domain extension.
A site costs a lot to build and this is only peanuts, and if you cant protect your brand maybe someone will protect yours and also keep your traffic.
Options:
1. Keep them parked at the registrar like GoDaddy and let them make money by showing ads on your parked domains.
2. forward them all to your main domain - not sure how search engines will treat that (duplicate).
3. create a single page site for each one of those and then add a link to your main site - again - for a new site - its a red flag for SEs that too many of your own domains are pointing back to you.. and then probability is that they all will be hosted at same IP, else spend more money for those IPs.
So.. what should be done with those Domains that you buy to protect your main domain?
sdani
2. forward them all to your main domain
Thats what I do. I would hope google wouldn't penalize for that considering,
google.net/info/biz/us/tv redirect to google.com
not to mention,
gooogle.com, goooogle.com, goooogle.com, googel.com also redirect
oh, and lets not forget gewgle.com (sounds gross)
forward them to main domain but using what? If I use the registrar's Web Forward systems, I don't think that uses 301 redirect.
Good question. I use godaddy forwarding, anybody know exactly how they do it?
My conclusion in this matter is you do what you feel like, but whether the money is spent in other ways or not at all, either way it's all the same.
Contrary to what you seem to believe Yahoo is obviously interested in capturing the traffic going to their .net domain. Maybe somebody should drop them a note suggesting they do a 301 for their non-www URL.
topsites, it's not always what it earns.... sometimes it makes sense to buy a domain to prevent your competitors getting their grubby hands on it.
No spam legit 10 page sites
Personally, I feel as long as you have the main widget.com name which comes up first when searching for widget , you don't have to go overboard by buying widget.biz, widget.info, widget.tv etc etc. Perhaps buy widget.org and widget.net.
Correct me if I am wrong, but 99percent of type in names are ended by .com (by browser default or by typee).
