The New Dot-Biz TLD compared to Dot-ComWritten by Kevin Clune
Would a rose.com by any other Top-Level-Domain (TLD) smell as sweet? Some entrepreneurs seem to think so. They're betting that they can profit by investing in new dot-biz extensions set to go live this October. Once again, single generic words like "business" or "home" will be up for grabs for use in domains like business.biz or home.biz thanks to recent moves by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), organisation in charge of managing Internet's TLDs.While dot-biz is not only new TLD soon to be available, it is one most likely to challenge dot-com for a share of domain market for businesses and one first expected to go live - making it new TLD of choice for some. But how valuable dot-biz names will end up being remains to be seen. Though dot-biz TLD can clearly play a niche role as a less expensive alternative to dot-com, dot-com extension has several advantages over dot-biz TLD. First and foremost, Internet grew up with dot-com suffix and that three-letter extension has been firmly imprinted into minds of every Internet user. This helps to explain why other General-TLDs like dot-net, and dot-org are not as popular or profitable as their dot-com counterpart. Additionally, it seems likely that biggest Internet players such as Amazon.com will buy up their dot-biz extension and merely redirect traffic to their dot-com site. Most of these companies have trademark rights to name already and are allowed to apply for them before general public.
| | Have you got your domain names covered?Written by Gim Yeap
The story of domain name dispute between etoy.com and eToys.com uncovers an important issue facing all webmasters, should we register domain names that are similar to ours? In eToys debacle, a group of artists registered domain name "etoy.com" in 1995. Then in 1997, an online toy store bought domain name "eToys.com" and in 1999, chose to sue etoy.com for use of a similar name. At first, etoy.com was forced to shut down it's site but 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 why webmasters should consider registering similar domain names. Firstly, we spend a lot of time and effort marketing our websites. It would all go to waste if someone 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 totally confused and will probably not return again. For example, if you had a site called AboutBigApple.com dedicated to city of New York and there's another site called AboutBigApples.com all about apples. A visitor expecting to find pictures on Central Park or Empire State Building would be served up photos of Grannys and Galas instead. Rather disorienting don't you think? Another good reason for registering similar domain names is to use them as doorway pages to help improve your search engine position. So you could have each domain name pointing to a single doorway page which is optimised using META tags and descriptive titles. The doorway page then links to your original site either automatically or via a link or button which users click on. With this, you would have protected all permutations of your domain names AND helped improved your search engine rankings. So how do we decide which similar domain names to register? It's entirely up to you but following guidelines can help. Say you have a domain called xxxxxx.com, possible high-risk domain names would be :
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