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Thread: How many domains?

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    Default How many domains?

    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? Seriously, though, do you flip the name around and point it to your main site? What are your thoughts on this?

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    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.

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    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.
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    I have .com/.net./.org
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    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
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    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.
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    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.

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    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.
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    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.
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    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.
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