Typos of your domain name

Has anyone ever registered one? Have yo

[Mr_Fern]

I registered a domain back in January, and opened the site in March. Without saying my domain, I'll just say it's 9 letters long. Recently I got curious as I had noticed sometimes if I typo'd one letter, I'd get a site with advertisements. I've come to discover that between 2 different companies, every 1 missing letter variation of my name was registered.

Have you ever been cloned in this format?

Have you ever cloned yourself just in case of something like this?

[Webwork]

It's fairly common practice anymore to register common typos and redirect them to the intended website. At the very least it causes the traffic leeches to go hungry. All the better it protects your intended visitors from unintended consequences of their humanity.

Another way of looking at the issue is the value of a waylaid customer. If the cost of the extra domain(s) is small compared to the potential loss of a customer then pick up a typo or two.

[dataguy]

I've never felt the need to register any typo's of my own domain names, but I had registered one for an affiliate program that I've used for about 5 years.

I typically log in to check my stats on this program 2-3 times per day, and several times per week I accidentally reversed two of the letters in the URL. I decided to register the typo just for convenience and forward it to the main URL of the site. When I set up the name I figured that I might has well add my affiliate ID as well.

A year latter I had almost 600 'referrals'... people who had apparently signed up for the service after finding the site through my miss-spelled domain name. The referral commissions were neglegable, and honestly I felt kind of sleazy being credited for these referrals, so after that first year I let the domain name expire.

Still, I think this proves the point that typo's can be very effective.

[topsites]

I would say it depends on the domain.

Specifically, there are some typos which are highly common (example - commerical is a common typo of commercial), and I feel one maybe two of these may be worth registering especially if you catch yourself doing it on a fair basis.

There are some domain names I *never* typo and if I do, it's not the same typo each time. Usually, the common typos occur when the typo also happens to be the 'easy way out,' that is to say when the natural flow of the fingers on the keyboard WANTS to type it the other way <- That would be one to register.

For a test, try typing commercial sometime, then type commerical <- You can feel commerical kinda 'flow' smoother, it's easier for the fingers to do, but for this you do need to have a somewhat proper typing technique.

There are others, I just can't think of any right now but like I said, it's one of those things you may or may not catch yourself doing <- Register it if you catch yourself on a regular basis and it's always the same word (i.e.: commerical), and no others. If in doubt, find a cheapo registrar for like 6 bucks / year and go for a 1-year term and see what happens.

One more thing is that for it to happen, it needs to happen kind of accidental... I find if I am trying out typos, it is better to wait and let it happen on its own for the natural typos are better.

Would *I* register a typo of my own domain, were it common and it happened naturally through the above process, for the mere purpose of gaining extra traffic?
Absolutely, Yes!
Matter of fact, I would go this route long before I went the route of registering other tld's (my-domaine.net, my-domaine.org, etc.) Is it blackhat? I think it's a bit grey, personally I would not frown on this myself, but that's just me and only if it were proper, such as with a common typo and not a whole slew of 'we thought you might accidentally type it this way' stuff, lol.

Last but not least, I do suspect the resulting traffic would be a fairly exact percentage of your existing traffic - And it would consist for a good portion of your regular visitors as well, thou in this case I think it works better than the tld route.

[DXL]

A few of my clients had domain names/businesses with tricky spellings, in those cases I ask them to register domains that would possibly appear if there was a typo. Otherwise I don't register typo domains.

There's at least one domain that I didn't get a client to register alternate spellings of a few years ago, and I greatly regret it today (because I'm positive that a large percent of site visitors aren't typing in his URL correctly, and the cybersquatters won't sell the similar domains for a reasonable amount).