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

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.

Answer 5

If you’re trying to build a brand image, then spending few more dollars to buy out all possible domain extensions is not a big burden. Today big brands try to use the different domains and use them wisely. For example, example.com will be the product info website, whereas .org is limited to the company profile; .net will have another purpose.

Consider the possibility that you might lose precious customers because you let your brand TLDs go away to a black hat agency or to some cheap website which started only to target your business. If a customer searches on Google for your business brand sees too many websites landing at different sites, he might lose his trust in you. Nowadays, domains are so cheap that for a branded, serious business establishment this amounts to nothing.