Stupid domain names
Domain names can be a bit like babies, you may think your son/daughter is the most beautiful baby in the world, when others just see a hairless chimpanzee.You may think your nice semi generic domain is the best thing in the world and worth £500k easily. Others will offer you £10.
But really, I mean really what were people thinking when they register domain names with a hyphen after every single letter in them? Take b-u-s-i-n-e-s-s.com as a perfect example. Who is going to type that into a browser? Yes people may type business.com into a browser but not with all the hyphens. Will it be any good for SEO purposes? Or course not. So why oh why do I still see these domains for sale. I mean here and now in 2008 people actually still think there is a market for these stupid domains with hyphens in. Just last week I saw some for sale on a couple of forums.
And what about those domains with the “www” as part of the domain, i.e. wwwbusiness.com. Again, who is going to type in www.wwwbusiness.com anywhere? If it was 1998 again and I saw these domains for sale I would half forgive the registrants for trying to flog them on, as it’s still a relatively new emerging market. But here and now, 10 years later what’s the excuse for trying to sell them on? Does anybody know?
What I’m listening to right now: Robin Thicke - “Something Else”
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 3:05 pm and is filed under General Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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[...] Update: Seems that bad domain names are bugging a lot of folks! [...]
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
wwwbusiness.com Could possibly be a good typo domain.
Kieron, you being a previous ppc affiliate, I would have thought would realise that these often make excellent display urls.
As a test I registered a wwwxyz.com domain (major league sports team site) to see what the typo value would be.
As per Compete, the real site gets around 2500 visitors per day. The typo site received approximately 1 visitor per day
(as per SEDO) so unless it’s a high value term in my experience typo sites like that aren’t worth it but that won’t stop people from trying that strategy out.
Marc’s comment about display urls is right on the money as well.
whilst I agree that these types of domains look crap there’s definetly a market for them. a bit like rubbish car number plates I suppose.
Actually, missing dot generic domains can get some direct typo traffic - I’ve tried a couple, parked at sedo with mixed success.
Not saying you can make a decent living out of it (unless you’ve got a hell of a lot of good ones) but they can make a return on the reg fee.
Agree with you on the p-i-z-z-a.co.uk type domains. Ah, I’ve just checked, that’s already reg’d
Don’t forget the quality of double hyphen domains and names with 0 instead of o
I suspect Kieron, like myself, is coming at this from a long-term / content-based website point of view rather than a short-term / spam-the-world one.
Btw, h-y-p-h-e-n.com is taken but h-y-p-h-e-n.co.uk is available.. L-O-L.
I used to own wwwfroogle.co.uk back in the day - got around 20 uniques per day for a while.
you obviously no nothing about type in/typo traffic then.
quote “Yes people may type business.com into a browser but”
well people type wwwbusiness.com
and miss a dot you would be surprised how many people do it
I’ve got a real crappy domain name. FRED67.com and nobody ever types it into a browser.
I bought it when I first went onto the internet 4 years ago or so. I don’t have the heart to ditch it, so I’ve built a whole series of other sites/blogs etc around it.
I get quite a lot of Twitter-Peeps hitting me, but no sales.
(I wonder why?) <:-)
Pete.
Domain name could be usual and worth a million they way the internet is heading. I’ve come across so even stupid ones but each domain could be worthwhile 4years from now.We are in a game that you never know who wins..Might be stupid today but worth millions tomorrow.
yeah, agreed, if someone is going for http://www.wwwsomeoldsite then they are clearly going for typo type in traffic. I still find it hard to believe that any significant number of people think that the best site for any topic can be found by just typing in the domain name and hoping. Im sure there is still type in traffic but if someone is putting in business.com then they are looking for that specific site - surely?!
Its hard to believe anyone (who has the sense to use and transact on your site) thinks “I’m looking to start a business, I know, lets forget this google thing everyone talks about and just tap business.com into my browser and maybe it’s a site all about businesses!”.
I still believe than any creative person should not be spending more than standard registration fees. With some obvious exceptions (eg buying an established site domain).
“Again, who is going to type in http://www.wwwbusiness.com anywhere?”
Kieron, you’re missing the point, it’s wwwbusiness.com people mistakenly type into their browser thus if you have a high traffic domain like Business.com or Sex.com it will get traffic from typos.
The typo would be from people missing the dot between “www” and “Business.com”.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that.
I’m not expert by a long shot but I have seen quite a few people in a previous job type url’s without the first dot so domains along the lines of wwwgoogle.com would be a good buy for the traffic.
Is wwwhere.org.uk still available lol.