Mispelt Domain Names are growing in popularity, as domainers realize they can capitalize on people misspelling domain names when visiting websites. When typing a domain into the search bar a customer may skip letters, double letters, reverse letters or not know how to spell a certain domain name. When an address is miss-typed the user may be redirected to the correct site, an advertising site, a completely incorrect site, or no site at all.
Domainers may register variations of popular trademarks or typos of trademarks with the intent of selling the domain to the company at a higher price, this is called Cybersquatting or Typosquatting respectively. Cybersquatting includes any domain purchases in which the buyer intends to profit from a domain which contains a trademark of any description.
Misspelt domains for the popular search term Facebook.com, such as faecbook.com direct to advertising of ‘free gifts’ that look similar to that of Facebook.com, but are not Facebook.
It can affect you negatively if other domainers own typos of your domain name, not only because they may indent on selling it to you at a high price but they could be capitalizing on the fact that their domain is a typo of a popular website.
The page in which the typo directs to could slander and in turn cause trouble for your website. Or, your competitor could use misspellings of your domain name to drive traffic to their website.
As a result it is common for companies to purchase commonly misspelt domain names similar to that of their business or that relate to their business. So if you do accidently misspell the domain you are still taken to the correct site. An example of this is Google, if you accidently type Gogle or Gooogle you are redirected to Google; the site you had intended to visit.
As an example if you own shoes.com you may see that it is important to also purchase shooes.com or soes.com or sheos.com. You can have the incorrectly spelt domains redirect to the intended website, shoes.com, by purchasing commonly misspelt domain names; this allows your customers to still reach your website. And more importantly it also stops potential cyber squatters from registering these domains and then competing against you and using your own goodwill and brand exposure against you.
Downlaod.com, Donwload.com and Dawnload.com, all sold for US$68,000 each, in 2005 in a private sale according to DN Journal. The domains are incorrectly spelt variations of Download.com
So when starting a new business, consider how your domain name or business name could be misspelled. A good tool to check potential misspellings is http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ via their misspelling search option.
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