I came across a keyword .com domain name that was being used by a publicly traded company as a mini portal to sell one of its products. The product did what the keyword domain name is, but neither the product nor the website were branded as the domain name.
I thought it was neat to see the company using a descriptive domain name to market one of its services, and I realized it’s most likely only for SEO purposes rather than marketing purposes. To clarify, the company isn’t sending people to this website but they are hoping people find it via Google instead.
How did I come to this conclusion (aside from the lack of real branding)? The company didn’t have www. enabled for its website.
If someone visited www.domainname.com, they would either be taken to a blank page or an ISP page with pay per click links, depending on the way they have their browser set up. The only way to get to the website is by navigating to the www. I take this to mean that they aren’t sending people to this site by word of mouth, but rather, they are driving traffic via search engine.
This may be interesting, but why does it matter? I think it matters because it shows that a company understands the value of descriptive domain names, and you can cite that as an example if you are pitching a domain name to the company. If you have their ear, it might even be nice for you to let them know about the www not being forwarded, especially if they tell you that their website isn’t working well enough to justify another expensive domain name acquisition.
There are lots of little things you should notice when doing research, and this is something I noticed. Whether the company is only using the domain name for SEO traffic or if it is an error on their part, knowing the problem and being able to give a friendly piece of advice may help you in a discussion and will at least make you look like a nice person.
You can’t tell us the domain?
If the www. isn’t resolving it’s likely a DNS error or the server configuration is setup incorrectly.
This is most certainly a mistake on their part — not using proper canonicalization certainly isn’t going to help their SEO efforts.
That is also a possibility.
That said, one would assume if they’re sending people there by word of mouth, they would have heard that the website doesn’t resolve.