Domain issues

will .org work better?

[charon]

Hi all

We've had an interesting issue arise here regarding a domain name and I thought I'd get your views.

A client of ours has a site which is in NO WAY porn related, but has a URL which could be plagerised and used that way. (They provide children's nannies from the UK to US families, I'll leave you to make the rather vague association).

Now they're getting lots and lots of porn spam and some rather nasty enquiries.

To avoid this in future, and to avoid their site coming up amongst unrelated search returns, they're suggesting registering a .org domain which as far as we can gather, can't be registered by porn sites. Personally I think this could get around the problem. But I was wondering if anyone else had tried it, and whether it worked.

Cheers
Charon

[FredP]

I've had similar problems with a client's site, but they showed me a few adult sites with .org. So what can be done?

[heini]

Sorry, but I don't quite understand where you are going with this question.
What has the domain name or the TLD got to do with it?
What are you trying to prevent - competing in search engines with adult sites, or users misunderstanding your content?

[pixel_juice]

There seems to be some general confusion around that domain extensions in some way reflect the content of the site. Like .net is 'cooler' .org is more serious and .com is passe :)

but has a URL which could be plagerised and used that way

How can someone 'plagerise' a url? There's nothing to stop anyone registering a domain name similar to yours unless it is a trademarked term or a company name etc. And even if they did, I don't see how this would affect you unless they were specifically targetting your visitors which seems unlikely. Is there any evidence that this might be happening? Otherwise I would forget about it.

[charon]

The issue is that they don't want to appear in porn-related searches (if possible).

The site contains no porn whatsoever, and shouldn't appear, but for some reason the porn industry think that the subject matter can be related to porn and hence created sites with similar URLs.

Obviously no site wants to appear in searches that aren't related. And they're hoping that a .org might get around that.

Hope that clears it up,
Charon

[pixel_juice]

.org will have no effect on this whatsoever. Anyone can register a .org, despite the guidelines.

If you have the misfortune to have porn-related terms it is extremely difficult to avoid getting the wrong type of visitor as porn searches will probably far outnumber the genuine ones.

[heini]

Charon, search engines return results independantly of TLDs (.org,.com,etc).
Where your site comes up in search engines is solely a question of your content and the links pointing to your site.

[ytswy]

Charon, there was a discusion here of a somewhat similar problem: [webmasterworld.com...]

Although this specifically is about getting hit for some particularly nasty (ie illegal) porn search phrases, I'm not sure if thats your problem.

There's a nice little php script about halfway through for redirecting people based on search phrase - ie sending people who search using a certain phrase to a page telling them to go away (or similar.. :) )

Probably not exactly what your looking for but maybe of some use.