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Mustang
08-14-2008, 09:22 PM
How many variations of your domain name do you have registered so no one else can piggyback off your name? For example, do you register your domain with a dot com as well as a dot net so others won't set up a similar shop elsewhere? :rolleyes: Seriously, though, do you flip the name around and point it to your main site? What are your thoughts on this?

KristineS
08-14-2008, 09:28 PM
We ended up buying a lot of domain names for our companies when we first starting setting them up. Most of them were allowed to lapse. It just didn't make sense to keep paying for the domains we weren't going to use.

cbscreative
08-14-2008, 10:03 PM
I usually recommend getting both the .com and the .net if you can, and if there are common misspellings, or a plural vs. singular, that could cause you to lose traffic, it's good to get those too whenever possible. I don't see a need to go overboard in most cases, but you also don't want all your efforts to get known for a domain name intruded upon when you have built a successful brand with it.

Evan
08-14-2008, 10:43 PM
I have .com/.net./.org

vangogh
08-15-2008, 12:02 AM
You can buy as many as you want, but at some point it it gets to be so much. If you start buying all the different TLDs (top level domain like .com, .net, .org, etc) it'll get out of control with all the different TLDs out there. Should you get .biz, .info?

A couple of things to keep in mind. Unless you have a pretty strong brand it's unlikely someone is going to try to piggy back off you. You might want to get .net and .org, but after that it's probably too much.

As far as misspellings go they can easily get out of control in a hurry and unless you know people are typing one or more common misspellings I probably wouldn't bother.

As far as what to do with them you should point them all at your hosting account like you did the primary domain and then use 301 (permanent) redirects to point the additional domains to your primary domain

orion_joel
08-15-2008, 12:18 AM
I just have the .com.au to my knowledge all the other extensions are or at least were registered. The only ones available are things like .info and .org, which i would assume are not a common mistake for .com.au.

I have from time to time looked at maybe getting the domain without the 's' on the end, or something abbreviations, and shortened versions, but i am really unsure, just how much traffic it would generate alone without additional promotion of the other domain names. I only questions this because it really seems kind of silly to promote 3 or 4 different domain names when you could just promote your one primary one.

billbenson
08-15-2008, 12:35 AM
I would thing that registering a name such as texasBBQ and Texas-BBQ makes sense. Maybe a .net but if they duplicate content and you are the first, just complain to google. They will look at it.

Of course its alway important to register the .ws version of your domain :)

Just in case, the above was a joke. don't use .ws domains.

vangogh
08-15-2008, 09:06 PM
I guess you could really get as many domains as you can afford. Domains are virtual real estate so even if you later decide you don't want to keep one you could always try selling it. Even better if you build a site on ot that's bringing in some revenue.

If it's just about protecting your brand it might makes sense to grab a few domains. At some point you can easily go overboard.

orion_joel
08-16-2008, 10:12 AM
I can admit that i went overboard with domains a bit, kinda of wasted quite a bit of money on it as well. I think at one point i had something like 40 or 50 domains, which i was someday thinking of making sites for. It is like going maybe i should start a business and open 40 or 50 locations in the next year (based on that i paid to register domains for a year). It is a mammoth task to even think about building and promoting 40 to 50 sites in under a year, to be able to justify renewing the domains.

vangogh
08-16-2008, 12:09 PM
I never had that many, but I did buy a bunch of domains I thought I might use and never did. Most I've just let expire, though a few I've held onto.

There's nothing wrong though with buying domains. It's a common business model to speculate in the domain market. Imagine some of the domains you could have bought 5 years ago for a few dollars and sold in the last 6 months for thousands or even hundreds of thousands. It's harder to find those domains now, but there are still people buying up domains today that will be making a huge profit on them a few years from now.

Aaron Hats
08-16-2008, 03:16 PM
I currently own four different domains, all hosted in different locations. When I first started the business I registered GetaHatOn.com then my web master recommended that I quickly register AaronHats.com. I now host my blog on AaronHats.com and sell from GetaHatOn.com. About three years ago I bought an existing web site TheHatSite.com (TheHatSite.co.uk) because of all its great content and it was a bargain. I link all of them and the search engines have rewarded us kindly.

billbenson
08-16-2008, 03:28 PM
Maybe there is a different approach to this as well. All the short .com names are taken. I suspect that eventually people will get used to typing in other tld's. If you have a long or cumbersome .com name and a short easy .biz name is available, why not register that and do a 301 from the .com to the .biz Is there any SEO reason not to do this?

Today, .biz kind of says unprofessional to me, but that will probably change in time.

This could have an impact on emails as well. Its really easy for someone to mess up an email spelled out over the phone if it has a long difficult domain.

vangogh
08-16-2008, 08:55 PM
Bill Google has show some indication they don't care for .info domains. I think the TLD is cheap right now and used more by spammers than legit folks so they start with a low level of trust. I'm not entirely sure, but that's the impression I've gotten from a few sources.

I'm not sure what the situation is with other extensions, but there are many who still say .edu and .gov have an extra level of trust based on the TLD alone. I think it's other reasons, but you never know. If there is some bias in favor of certain domains there could equally be bias against others.

Again not sure any of the above is true. More speculation and things I've heard.

On the other hand I agree that in time as all the .coms are gone some of the other TLDs will likely become more valuable. I think many of those are already being snatched up and you don't know which will be the one or ones that will gain favor.

billbenson
08-16-2008, 10:34 PM
Ya, I'm just wondering if its not a good idea to get a few and sit on them for 5 years.

vangogh
08-16-2008, 11:41 PM
Not like they're expensive now. You'd think in time some are going to go up greatly in value. You may also want to build a small site on each. It probably doesn't have to be anything spectacular, but if you can be bringing in some revenue the domains should be worth that much more.

billbenson
08-17-2008, 12:35 AM
So what tld's make sense on a 5 year plan?
.net
.biz
What else?

vangogh
08-17-2008, 01:06 AM
Well .net has been around for awhile and many of the shorter domains are already gone. Hard to know if .biz is going to do anything.

Don't forget .org

After that it might just be country specific TLDs. They're gaining in popularity so people can spell out words like del.icio.us though that would be a harder market to speculate about.

orion_joel
08-17-2008, 03:09 AM
Using the TLD to spell out words, may become one of the ways around missing a short domain name, it will probably more so come down to how people will recognize sites such as this, and yes i would think it would have a very limited market space, as not all TLD's lead them selves to the ending of words. But then who knows maybe they will realize it is something people want to do and create a TLD such as ".ing" gives a lot of options for spelling things out.