Have you got your domain names covered?

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The story of the domain name dispute between etoy.com and ...
uncovers ... issue facing all ...
should we register domain names that are similar toours? In the eToys debacle, a g The story of the domain name dispute between etoy.com and eToys.com uncovers animportant issue facing all webmasters, should we register domain names that are similar toours? 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 tosue etoy.com for the use of a similar name. At first, etoy.com was forced to shut down it's sitebut 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 whywebmasters should consider registering similar domain names.Firstly, we spend a lot of time and effort marketing our websites. It would all go to waste ifsomeone 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 totallyconfused and will probably not return again.
For example, if you had a site calledAboutBigApple.com dedicated to the city of New York and there's another site calledAboutBigApples.com all about apples. A visitor expecting to find pictures on Central Park orthe Empire State Building would be served up photos of Grannys and Galas instead.
Ratherdisorienting don't you think?Another good reason for registering similar domain names is to use them as doorway pages tohelp improve your search engine position. So you could have each domain name pointing to asingle doorway page which is optimised using META tags and descriptive titles.
The doorwaypage then links to your original site either automatically or via a link or button which usersclick on. With this, you would have protected all permutations of your domain names ANDhelped 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 calledxxxxxx.com, possible high-risk domain names would be :xxxxxxs.comxxxxxx.netxxxxxx.orgxxxxxxs.netxxxxxxs.orgOr you can try this service at http://www.nameprotect.com mmonitoring.htm that helps trackyour domain name for possible threats. The service generates a free monthly report on yourdomain name and gives suggestions of high-risk domain names to register.
It also has afeature 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 someoneregisters a similar domain name, it's done completely innocently.
For example, our site atwww.payingads.com started receiving emails from visitors saying that they couldn't get intotheir accounts using their username and passwords. A quick check in our databases revealedthat these visitors were not our site's members but members of a site calledwww.payingad.com.
This site pays people for viewing ads while our site is a global exchangefor people looking for paying web ads to place on their websites. Our businesses are differentso it was obvious that payingad was not trying to usurp our users.
So we're content to justleave things as they are.However, we still get user complaints on our site mistaking us for the other site, typicallyaround 2 to 4 a day. If you find yourself in this situation, deal with it carefully.
Though some ofthe emails can get quite irate, remember to always be courteous and take time to clarify thesituation 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 orusername.
It's like being told you have brown eyes when you know your eyes are blue. Politelyexplain that there is a site of a similar name and direct them there.
Also, explain more aboutyour own site as they might also be interested in your own services. Who knows, you mighteven come away with a few more new visitors to your site.
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