I'm Just Sharing

Last week I got an email from a company that said it was in Hong Kong. They said someone had bid on my business domain name, yet they saw that I owned it and wanted to verify that I did still indeed own it and the rights to it. I wrote back saying yes.

Then I got a second email thanking me for the first one, and then it stated that the bidder for the domain name was also bidding on all the other extensions of my business name, as in .net, .biz, etc. It also said that they were bidding on the keyword of the business name as well.

On those others not only didn’t I care, but I didn’t believe it either. Those other extensions have been out there for 8 years, and why someone would try to scarf them up now would be beyond me. But this thing about the keyword confused me. I hadn’t ever heard of any such thing, and before I dismissed it, I wanted to see if any of my tekkie friends had either.

I picked up the phone and called my friend Josh to see if he’d ever heard of any such thing. He said he hadn’t, and that the whole thing sounded like a scam to him. I said I was beginning to think it was a scam as well.

Still, I did write one more email to these people saying that I could care less if someone else decided they wanted to purchase all the other domain names, and that I was secure enough in my SEO abilities that my main site wouldn’t be affected by anyone else purchasing them, or deciding to pay for keywords for my business domain name.

Of course, at this juncture I believe it’s all a lot of nonsense, and yet it needs to be written about because if it’s something that made me think, and I’ve been doing this a long time now, it might make someone without a lot of computer knowledge go off and spend a lot of money trying to protect something that doesn’t need protecting.

Here’s the thing. It’s often recommended that when you buy a certain domain name that you should buy all the rest of the extensions at the same time. Thing is, that can be expensive, and it’s definitely overkill. At best all you’re going to do is forward all those other iterations of your business name to your main one, because it wouldn’t make sense to put up a separate website for each domain. Now, if you’re a large company like Sony, that makes sense; for the rest of us, save your money.

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