Protecting your internet brand
On Friday, there was an interesting news story in Het Laatste Nieuws, which shows the need for companies to be vigilant when they want to protect their internet brand. Apparently Google earns quite some money through advertisements that are placed on websites that have a misspelled name. The phenomenon of registering intentionally misspelled domain names, e.g. domain names that are only one letter different from existing popular domain names, is called “typosquatting”. It is one of at least two ways in which your online brand can be misused by others.
Cybersquatting
The first method revolves around predicting the need for the domain name itself. A perfect example of this in recent times was with the release of Apple’s Ipad. People tried to buy names like www.Islate.com; www.Ipaper.com; www.Ipage.com in the hopes that one of them would be the new name of Apple’s new gadget. If they are lucky and actually guess the name of the product and register it, they might be able to sell this domain to Apple for a huge profit or get revenues by placing ads on the “cybersquatted” site. Off course, this isn’t always possible because apple’s main domain is http://www.apple.com/insertgadgethere but there are many other products that have their respective website like www.senseo.com (product of Philips) or www.nespresso.com (product of Nestlé).
Another way of “cybersquatting” is looking for the domains that are not yet registered. Let’s take for example Douwe Egberts, a coffee roasting company. Douwe Egberts registered the URL www.douwe-egberts.com which will be their main domain name. A “cybersquatter” will register www.douwe-egberts.be or www.douwe-egberts.eu. This way, if people look for the company Douwe Egberts, they will have multiple options and perhaps click on the link of the “cybersquatter” which redirects them to a website with wrong info, spyware or other information that you as a company do not want. Another example of a company that is aware of “cybersquatting” is a newspaper called “het laatste nieuws”. There URL is www.hln.be but you could use www.hetlaatstenieuws.be as well. No luck for “cybersquatting” this brand.
Typosquatting
“Typosquatting” is a way where you use common typing errors. For example, people type www.google.com like www.googel.com or www.gooogle.com. In this case, Google already registered most common misspelled ways of Google and redirected them to the correct website. This common way of mistyping can lead you to an alternate site containing information that might be harmful to your company or brand or associate your product with something you do not want.
Did you know
Did you know that people visit “typosquatted” and “cybersquatted” sites about 68 million times a day.
Did you know that Google makes around 497 million dollar each year by “typosquatting” (ad revenue).
Did you know that Arnold Schwarzenegger registered the 10 most misspelled ways of his name?