Have you
got your domain names covered?
by Gim Yeap
1 of 2>> |
The story of the domain name
dispute between etoy.com and eToys.com uncovers an important
issue facing all webmasters, should we register domain names
that are similar to ours? In the eToys debacle, a group of
artists registered the domain name "etoy.com" in 1995. Then in
1997, an online toy store bought the domain name "eToys.com"
and in 1999, chose to sue etoy.com for the use of a similar
name. At first, etoy.com was forced to shut down it's site but
thanks to public pressure eToys.com dropped it's lawsuit in
January. (For more on this, please read http://www.rtmark.com/etoyline.html)
Of course, not all domain name disputes will lead to
court but there are reasons why webmasters should consider
registering similar domain names. Firstly, we spend a lot of
time and effort marketing our websites. It would all go to
waste if someone registered a similar sounding website and all
your traffic went to them instead. Worse, if this site's focus
was completely irrelevant to yours, then users would be
totally confused and will probably not return again. For
example, if you had a site called AboutBigApple.com dedicated
to the city of New York and there's another site called
AboutBigApples.com all about apples. A visitor expecting to
find pictures on Central Park or the Empire State Building
would be served up photos of Grannys and Galas instead. Rather
disorienting don't you think?
Another good reason for
registering similar domain names is to use them as doorway
pages to help improve your search engine position. So you
could have each domain name pointing to a single doorway page
which is optimised using META tags and descriptive titles. The
doorway page then links to your original site either
automatically or via a link or button which users click on.
With this, you would have protected all permutations of your
domain names AND helped improved your search engine
rankings.
>>next:
which similar domains to register ?
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