Is it good to buy multiple domains for competitive reasons?

Question

I am attempting to convince the higher ups at my company that spending $55 to renew one domain for a year is bad when they end up having 3-4 domains names for one website.

They're reasoning for doing so is to keep these domains names out of the hands of the competition.

For example, the company name is Pie Consulting & Engineering. They want to buy up pieforensicconsulting.com to keep it out of the hands of a competitor (we also do forensic engineering).

Could a competitor use that domain in any kind of diabolical way? I mean I figure if someone is typing in pieforensiconsulting into the URL field, they know what they're looking for and if it redirects to another company, they're not just going to stay on the site.

Answer 1

Well, it really depends on how big is your business, how unique is your domain name and how much you can spend!

But the short answer is, yes, they should do it and it's important too!

Let say your company currently have these two domains:

• pieglobal.com
• pieforensicconsulting.com

IMO you should also secure other popular TLDs with similar names, such as:

• pieglobal.net
• pieglobal.org
• pieglobal.us

That's same for all domains you have...

But be careful! if you're going to use these domains as redirects and serve similar content in all of them, it's very important that you define one canonical url, so you don't make search engines and the users confused. read more: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

Answer 2

Adding to Omne's answer...

I figure if someone is typing in pieforensiconsulting into the url field, they know what they're looking for

Not necessarily. In Chrome (and other browsers) the URL/Address bar is also the search box. And many people only navigate via the search box, never actually typing a full URL into the address bar. I think that is also what you are protecting against... people who search for your company and don't necessarily know the correct URL.

Lets say another competitor (or innocent unrelated company in another country) setup their website on pieforensicconsulting.com and perhaps even used similar keywords in their copy (what are the chances?). If a user searches for your site but their site appears higher in the SERPs, the user may mistakenly click on their site and it might not be immediately obvious that they are actually on the wrong site? Or they might even think they are on the right site? Or they might not know who exactly they are looking for?

If that is a concern then you should register the additional domains.

Answer 3

Well, you obviously want to avoid cybersquatting. Imagine you have a pretty popular brand, but only bought the .com TLD. You get many visitors with branded queries (brand name in the query).

A blackhat SEO will buy another generic TLD (.net, .org, .biz, etc.) and put content on it, generate backlinks quickly and ranks just behind the official website. He will get many visitors, and a few days later he will redirect them to its money site, which is in the same niche as the brand. He will "steal" many visitors until the site gets unranked on those branded queries (this can last a long time).

The blackhat can then target other brands in the same niche with the same tactic to get many visitors, can be several thousands of them every day.

That's why you NEED to buy every generic TLD when you are a serious brand or have a serious site.

Answer 4

If you try to build brand image then spending few more dollors to buy out all possible domain extentions is not a big burden. Today big brandes try to use the different domains and use it wisely eg, xxx.com willbe the product info website where as .org is only limited to company profile .net ....

Consider loosing precious customers for letting your brand tld 's go away to your black hat agency or some cheap website which started only target your business . if customer googled your business brand and if he see too many websites landing at different sites , i doubtful that he can trust you any more . Nowdays domain so cheap that for a branded , serious business establishment this amount is nothing.

Answer 5

EMD's are not as good as they used to be...

Google now rewards less weight for EMD (Exact Matching Domains) So nowadays it's best to put those renewal costs on something more productive. Your competitors will have a harder time trying to beat your domain that is aged than ever before.