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.
First, 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.
So how do we decide which similar domain names to register? It's
entirely up to you but the following guidelines can help. Say
you have a domain called xxxxxx.com, possible high-risk domain
names would be: xxxxxxs.com xxxxxx.net xxxxxx.org xxxxxxs.net
xxxxxxs.org Or you can try this service at
http://www.nameprotect.com mmonitoring.htm that helps track your
domain name for possible threats. The service generates a free
monthly report on your domain name and gives suggestions of
high-risk domain names to register. It also has a feature that
can tell you if anyone is trademarking a name that's similar to
your domain name. What happens if there's already somebody else
with a similar name? The best thing to do is to co-exist with
this other site. Most of the time, whenever someone registers a
similar domain name, it's done completely innocently. For
example, our site at
www.payingads.com started receiving emails
from visitors saying that they couldn't get into their accounts
using their username and passwords. A quick check in our
databases revealed that these visitors were not our site's
members but members of a site called
www.payingad.com. This site
pays people for viewing ads while our site is a global exchange
for people looking for paying web ads to place on their
websites. Our businesses are different so it was obvious that
payingad was not trying to usurp our users. So we're content to
just leave things as they are. However, we still get user
complaints on our site mistaking us for the other site,
typically around 2 to 4 a day. If you find yourself in this
situation, deal with it carefully. Though some of the emails can
get quite irate, remember to always be courteous and take time
to clarify the situation to them. It's bad enough that they keep
getting "Invalid password/username" messages whenever they try
to log on even when they're certain it's the right password or
username. It's like being told you have brown eyes when you know
your eyes are blue. Politely explain that there is a site of a
similar name and direct them there. Also, explain more about
your own site as they might also be interested in your own
services. Who knows, you might even come away with a few more
new visitors to your site.
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