The tale of the domain name conflict between etoy.com and eToys.com reveals a significant issue that all website owners must consider: should we secure domain names that are similar to our own? In the eToys incident, a group of artists registered the domain name "etoy.com" in 1995. Two years later, an online toy store purchased the domain name "eToys.com" and in 1999, decided to sue etoy.com for the use of a similar name. Initially, etoy.com was compelled to close its site, but due to public outcry, eToys.com withdrew its lawsuit in January.
Not all domain name disputes will result in legal action, but there are compelling reasons why website owners should consider securing similar domain names.
Firstly, we invest considerable time and effort into promoting our websites. This investment could be wasted if someone registered a similar sounding website and redirected your traffic to their site. Worse still, if this site's focus was entirely unrelated to yours, users could be completely confused and unlikely to return. For example, if you had a site called AboutBigApple.com dedicated to New York City and there's another site called AboutBigApples.com all about apples. A visitor expecting to find images of Central Park or the Empire State Building would instead be presented with photos of Granny Smiths and Galas. This could be quite disorienting.
Another valid reason for registering similar domain names is to use them as doorway pages to enhance your search engine position. You could have each domain name pointing to a single doorway page optimized with 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 strategy, you would have safeguarded all variations of your domain names AND boosted your search engine rankings.
The decision on which similar domain names to register is entirely up to you, but the following guidelines can help. If you have a domain called xxxxxx.com, potential high-risk domain names could be:
You can also use services like NameProtect that help monitor your domain name for potential threats. This service generates a free monthly report on your domain name and provides suggestions of high-risk domain names to register. It also features a tool that can inform you if anyone is trademarking a name that's similar to your domain name.
The best course of action is to co-exist with the other site. Most of the time, when someone registers a similar domain name, it's done completely innocently. For instance, our site at www.payingads.com started receiving emails from visitors saying that they couldn't access their accounts using their username and passwords. A quick check in our databases revealed that these visitors were not our site's members but members of a site called www.payingad.com. This site pays people for viewing ads while our site is a global exchange for people looking for paying web ads to place on their websites. Our businesses are different so it was clear that payingad was not trying to usurp our users. So we're content to just leave things as they are.
However, we still receive user complaints on our site mistaking us for the other site, typically around 2 to 4 a day. If you find yourself in this situation, handle it with care. Although some of the emails can be quite irate, always be courteous and take time to clarify the situation to them. It's frustrating enough for them to keep getting "Invalid password/username" messages when they're certain they're using the correct credentials. It's like being told you have brown eyes when you know your eyes are blue. Politely explain that there is a site of a similar name and direct them there. Also, provide more information about your own site as they might also be interested in your services. Who knows, you might even gain a few more new visitors to your site.
