Advice

Buying domain names that are confusingly similar to your brand or product is a smart move that many companies don’t consider. However, owning domain names that are confusingly similar to your brands, but not forwarding that traffic to your main website is just plain stupid!

Extra TV, an NBC television show and a Warner Brothers Entertainment production has a feature called Luxaholics, and WB owns the corresponding domain name Luxaholics.com. Thumbs up to them for inventing a term, buying the matching domain name, and then branding the term. They also showed intelligence by purchasing the domain name Luxaholic.com as well.   Unfortunately, this domain name goes to a dead page.

Come on WB!!   Smarten up and forward the alternative domain name to the main page!   It might not mean much additional traffic, but it certainly doesn’t cost anything extra to do it.

Have you ever received more than one email offer or inquiry on a domain name in a short period of time and not know why?   I am sure most people search for the domain’s key term(s) in Google to see what people might be looking to find, but that might not get you the most relevant information.

Before you reply to the inquiry, check Google News and Google Blog Search for the term(s) both quoted and unquoted. While News and Blog results are generally listed in the standard Google results first, they may not appear at the top of the results, rendering the fresh information useless.   If someone is trying to buy a domain name from you because a television network just announced a show with the same name as your domain name, you should know this before you respond.

If you receive more than one inquiry on a single domain name, especially if it’s irregular that you receive inquiries on this particular domain name, you should assume it’s not coincidental.   Having the most updated information is critical when determining how to reply to an inquiry, and Google’s information, like their News and Blog Search, can help you filter through the crap.

Before you buy a domain name, especially an acronym, check to see what is currently being displayed on the website to make sure it’s not infringing on another company’s mark. If you buy a domain name that had infringed on a company’s mark in the past, you could be held liable for the domain name’s past use.

Take this as an example. You decide you want to buy a great 3 letter .com domain name. You search Google for acronyms just to see how it could be used, and you find out that a major technology company is sometimes known by the acronym. When you check the domain name, the current landing page has this company’s ads (or a competitor’s). This could put a new owner in harm’s way.

Not only do I look at the current landing page and ask the owner about the landing page history, I also do some research to see what was on the page previously. I like to use Archive.org to see what was previously displayed on a website. It’s always better to ask questions to gauge potential risk down the road.