Whizzing Around My Territory

by Sapphire (May 13, 2005)

Today, I decided to get territorial. I have one site that’s doing much better than I expected, and it’s a .info domain. I just bought the .com, .org and .net at Namecheap.com and put redirects on all of them to the real domain. I was getting a lot of searches for the domain name itself, and that made me suspect people are hearing about it by name, then looking under .com and finding nothing. (Hey, at least they’re interested enough to search!)

But there’s also the issue of someone buying a domain with my name but a different extension. I’d be kicking myself if the site really, really takes off and someone buys up the most common variations on them and sticks a “Gamble with Drugs to Get Free Porn!” site on it. Shudder.

I’m probably jumping the gun. Some people never bother to buy up their “ghost extensions”, and others buy them all together at the same time. It cost me about $35 to buy them all and put WhoIs protection on them (that keeps your personal info from being available to everyone who looks you up in WhoIs). I consider it money well spent, because I’m taking that site seriously.

My other domains? I’m letting those slide for now because they’re all .coms, which is the extension most people will look for first.

Posted in Development & Design
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