Would you use a brand name in a URL?
August 3, 2010 7:19 AM   Subscribe

If you were selling a product at (fictional example) socialnetworkmarketing.com, would you buy facebookmarketing.com and twittermarketing.com to just redirect to socialnetworkmarketing.com?

If so, why? Would those keyword rich domains help socialnetworkmarketing.com rank better in google even if they're just redirecting?

If they're just redirecting, would they run into any trouble from the brand-name owners?

For example, Apple comes down hard on websites using the word iPod. ipodlounge.com changed to ilounge.com, and now they're VERY highly ranked for the word "iPod". They were, of course, operating for years under ipodlounge, so I'm not sure how much of that ranking can be attributed to just the redirect.

If I'm starting from scratch, from day one, does a domain name with a popular brand name still have value if it's only meant to redirect?

Should I buy a few keyword rich domains to redirect to my actual site, or just save my money?
posted by smersh to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
would you buy facebookmarketing.com and twittermarketing.com to just redirect to socialnetworkmarketing.com?

Yes; but not for the reason you think. I'd buy them so that I could deny the domain to a competitor, and keep my options open for a spin-off business.

Would those keyword rich domains help socialnetworkmarketing.com rank better in google even if they're just redirecting.

Nope. Not even a little bit.

Buy domains that a relevant to your business, since you might use them for your business.

Save your money if you're doing that for SEO purposes and spend it on a proper audit of your content and site structure.
posted by generichuman at 7:33 AM on August 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


The only way that your extra redirect pages could make any difference in your ranking is if you somehow had a bunch of existing inbound links to those domains and you used 301s to redirect them to the main site, in which case that link juice would be transitive. But if you're just starting out and nobody has ever linked to those domains before then it can't possibly help. A redirect domain sitting there alone in the void with nobody linking to it does absolutely nothing other than catch people that type things into their address bar. Trying to build inbound links to those redirect domains would only just dilute any efforts to build inbound links to your main site so it would be silly to do that if they didn't already exist.

And anyway, good content and accessible layout are way more important to ranking than keywords in the domain name -- ilounge gets good ranking because its content is relevant to ipod owners, not because of anything having to do with domain names. Spend your time on things that matter.
posted by Rhomboid at 8:36 AM on August 3, 2010 [1 favorite]


If they're just redirecting, would they run into any trouble from the brand-name owners?

There's really no easy way to know for sure ahead of time. If what you're asking is "will this use run afoul of trademark laws", the best answer is "get a lawyer", because trademark law (at least in the US) is a little hairy and extremely fact and context specific. That said, two things to be aware of with respect to trademark law are trademark dilution and initial interest confusion. Wouldn't hurt to understand how ICANN's Uniform Domain-name Dispute Resolution (UDRP) Policy works, either.

That said, in many situations it's less about what would technically win at trial or arbitration and more about how much trouble you're willing to go to in order to defend the domain. Would you refuse if you got a cease and desist letter? Would you hire an attorney? Would you go to trial?

If you want to use them and defend them against potential action from the brand owner, it would serve you well to consult an intellectual property attorney before you start so you know what you need to do (or not do) to stay within the law. (And note: there's a ton of bad information intellectual property laws floating around the 'net, so be mindful of the provenance of the information on which you make major business decisions)

In a lot of situations, it's just not worth all that, so it's not so much a matter of what's legal and more a matter of what the brand owner wants to "allow".

In this case, the domains don't give you any search clout. They'll probably provide some small number of direct hits from folks typing in the URL and hoping for the best. Having them does keep a potential competitor from taking them. Unless you're prepared (in both will and means) to defend them, the brand owner can probably shut them down at will.

So, based on all that, it might be worth the cost of the registration to have them, but I certainly wouldn't attempt to build a business on them as a brand.
posted by toomuchpete at 9:44 AM on August 3, 2010


Response by poster: thank you all so much.
posted by smersh at 10:16 PM on August 3, 2010


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