Domane Misplling
Web Site Promotion For The Small Business v2
November 22, 2007
Ever misspelled a URL when you typed it in and either got a porn site or a page with a bunch more links; or better yet, another web site related to the subject you were searching for? Domain mispellings are common. These days, traffic is being driven based on misspelled domain names.
Is benefiting from the traffic driven by misspellings legal?
There is some flack stirring up about the practice of purchasing domain misspellings. Amazon.com explicitly prohibits this practice when you are part of their affiliate program.
There is a United States Federal Law on cyber-squatting, called the Anti-Cyber squatting Consumer Protection Act, that was enacted in 1999. This Act provides protection to US as well as foreign trade
marks. It provides guidance to the court and helps it to determine if
bad faith persists with regard to the use of domains that dispute each
other in court. What we are talking about here, is obtaining a misspelling of another domain name. In a case brought by Nieman-Marcus against Dotster,Nieman-Marcus domain name. the Camaroons (.cm) monetized every possible misspelling of the
My suggestion is to try and stay away from trademarked or large corp web site names and if someone does contact you, give them the name (or let them buy it from you at market rates). It's not worth the legal fight.
What are the best misspellings for my domain?
I'm sure you can guess some of them. One example would be Microsoft, which owns the domain microsoft.com. I recently ran a typo-generator, which is an SEO tool to generate variations on a domain name, against the name in order to come up with some more variations on the name that we should purchase. They were:
- microsfot.com
- nicrosoft.com
- kicrosoft.com
- jicrosoft.com
- mocrosoft.com
- mucrosoft.com
- mkcrosoft.com
- midrosoft.com
- mivrosoft.com
- mixrosoft.com
- miceosoft.com
- mictosoft.com
- micgosoft.com
- micfosoft.com
- micrisoft.com
- micrlsoft.com
- micrpsoft.com
- microeoft.com
- microaoft.com
- microdoft.com
- microwoft.com
- microsift.com
- microslft.com
- microspft.com
- microsort.com
- microsott.com
- microsoct.com
- microsodt.com
- microsofr.com
- microsofg.com
- microsofy.com
I'm not sure if they purchased all of these domain names.
Check out this blog post. It contains a list of many of the variations of Google's domain and where they actually go.
I purchased 10 variants of my domain. What now?
The domains need to either all point to your web site, in order to drive traffic there, or, you can park the web sites and have targeted ads on the parking page. There are services out there that will handle ad placement and parking of your extraneous domain names. Some are:
Others out there are promoting this as a legitimate way to make money on the Internet. Decide for yourself.
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© Copyright 2009, John A. Simpson. All Rights Reserved.
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Make sure you are careful with this one. Several registrars have been stealing domain names right after someone looks them up.