Tag Archives: squatting

Extra parked or redirect domains don’t show up in search engines

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Extra or redirect domains that redirect to a different “primary” domain do not help you by showing up in search engine results.  For example, if Bevelwise were to own the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com which is full of keywords and redirect that domain’s traffic to bevelwise.com it would not help us in search engine rankings at all.  If someone were to look for the domain websitemarketinggrandrapids.com in Google, it wouldn’t be found.

If search engines were to see this extra domain and try to index it, they would see that there is not any content on this domain, it just redirects to a different website.  Therefore, it has no search engine value and the search engines will completely ignore it.

Back in the earlier days of the internet, people used to type in the address bar a keyword and add “.com” to try to find something.  For example, someone who wanted to buy office furniture might type in “officefurniture.com” and hope they are taken to a legitimate website.  People who wanted to capture this traffic would purchase these domain names and put up websites or redirect this traffic to a different site. This is sometimes called “blind” searching and it is very rare to find people doing this today.  Search engines have  removed the need to do blind searching.

There are a few reasons to have and keep these extra domains.  The primary reason is to ensure that no one else (like your competitor) buys the domain.  That is a very good reason why you would want to buy the “.net” and “.org” version of your primary domain, you wouldn’t want your competitors to have those domains.

The other reason to have extra redirect domains is to capture the traffic of common misspellings of your primary domain name.  For example, Google owns the domain gogle.com and if you go to that address it redirects people to the primary domain of google.com.

Outside of the two above reasons, we do not recommend to purchase additional or extra domain names unless you intend to create unique websites for those domains.

Have you locked up your Brand Identity for Social Media?

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There are several sites out there that people use for sharing information and more social media aspects that you should consider registering your name. Even if you don’t plan to use Facebook or Twitter, we would advise you at least lock up your name so someone else cannot steal it – which is known as “squatting”. Besides, just because you don’t plan to use either of them does not mean there isn’t the next hottest one around the corner that you should lock up.

This happened with domain names in the mid 90′s as websites were coming into popularity. Several Fortune 500 companies ended up in court trying to get their trademarked names back. There has not been any precedence set for Social Media and if and how companies can get control of their Brand once it has been registered by someone else who is not them. As reference, here is an article from Adage that shows you some of the big Brands that don’t own their Twitter identity.

You can see if anyone has squatted you out and potentially avoid that by visiting UserNameCheck.com. There are 68 different sites that someone could “squat” you on. Some of them you have never heard of, several are familiar and you can find all the different sites people could squat your identity on. You never know what might be the next big fad or emerge so it is best to lock them up and as new “fads” come out, register those as well, even if you don’t ever use them – you can at least know you are protecting your Brand when it comes to Internet & Web Marketing and Social Media.