Hi Angie. I'd go along with Charlotte. We've dropped various domains over recent years that we'd held as a precautionary measure (I think everyone did that, and fair enough). Tiny amounts of traffic came in and more than money, they take management time. So it will be a matter of cost and benefit. 

On the benefits side, have a think about what traffic you might be losing. To get an idea of how much traffic actually comes to your site from people typing in your domain name directly, look at your web stats for visits where the traffic source is "direct". Then look at the landing pages: it's probably safe to assume that where people arrived at a page other than your home page they didn't type it in. In our case perhaps 3% of people arrive on our home page directly i.e. not referred by another site or search engine. Then think about what proportion of those might have come by people typing in that URL as opposed to using a bookmark, clicking a link in an e-mail. Probably a tenth, if that. So for us I'd guess 0.3-0.5% of people come to our site by typing in the address. Of those the majority will do so because they know it rather than be guessing. I can't tell how many got it wrong, by definition, but I'd be surprised if it was more than a tenth again. So perhaps we lose 0.03% of potential visitors by people typing in the wrong domain name. You don't want to lose 1/3000 visitors of course, but for us we're talking 1-2000 people a year, most of whom will probably try again immediately with the help of google. To avoid losing those couple of thousand we'd have to buy dozens of different variations of domain names under .org, .org.uk, .com, .co.uk, .net and so on. It's not worth it either financially or in terms of time. I've also had long experience of domains being bought and "managed" by people in different parts of the organisation. They buy them using different resellers & myriad accounts, they leave, we can't find the owner or we decide we want to bring all our domains under one reseller and it's just a lot of work. 

There might be a case for a small amount of that practice still, though. Recently we had a situation where a company was using a .org version of one of our domains for a link-farm. They'd tweet using the term "Imperial War Museum Collections" in the tweet, and from an ever-changing array of accounts. I can't quite figure out how the whole scam was meant to help them with selling their random junk, but I persisted for a few months in reporting every single tweet that did this and now it's stopped (although I don't know if reporting them had anything to do with it). The thing is, legal remedies were not really available, or at least not worth the hassle. It's not illegal to use our name, unless it's to pretend to be us, but this was simply inserting our name into an irrelevant tweet. And a .org domain doesn't have the legal constraints of .org.uk (which is not for commercial use), so although they used our name in a clear attempt to mislead it's pretty hard to see how we could have stopped them. I did the usual WHOIS lookups and chasing them was going to be a nightmare, the people who do that are well versed in slipping out of trouble. Although they'd used a near-clone of our domains the real problem was arguably that they used our name in the content of our site. But if we'd bought up all the main variations around that particular domain name it might have been useful. But the lesson for me is that having so many of our own domains to start with makes it harder to cover off the variations on them. 

Cheers, Jeremy



Jeremy Ottevanger
Technical Web Manager
Imperial War Museum
Lambeth Road
London SE1 6HZ


-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sexton, Charlotte
Sent: 11 May 2012 16:11
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Best practice for domain name registration (and preventing cyber-squatting)

Hi
About 10 years ago we used to have several domains registered with
variations of our name - working on the 'just in case' principle...

We've now dropped almost all of them as they seemed redundant given the
level of brand awareness for 'National Gallery' (and variations there of)
and the power of search engines to send us traffic directly, without people
typing in a specific URL.

From a marketing point of view it also meant we could put all our efforts
into raising awareness for a single URL.

We only ever had one instance many years ago of serious 'cyber-squatting'
and we dealt with it fairly straight forwardly with a strongly worded letter
from our layers and a complaint to the ISP.

I think the trick is to really raise brand awareness, and keep the URL
simple and easy to remember.

If you were going to bother having extra URLs registered then I'd suggest
including the odd variation for common abbreviations of your name or to
cover obvious typos.

Best
Charlotte

-- 
Charlotte Sexton
Head Digital Media

The National Gallery
Trafalgar Square, 
London WC2N 5DN
T +44 (0)20 7747 2850
www.nationalgallery.org.uk

On 11/05/2012 13:55, "Vanhegan, Angie" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Hello
> 
> We've been following what we thought to be best practice and registering lots
> of permutations of our domain names to prevent cyber-squatting (different
> spellings, hyphenation, different domain suffixes etc). We don't spend huge
> sums on it and we've cut back on lots of variations in recent years, but it
> feels like it may still be unnecessary. What are other people doing?
> 
> Best
> 
> Angie
> 
> --------------------------
> Angie Vanhegan
> Web Team Manager - Communications Dept
> Wellcome Trust
> Ext 8815
> Mobile 07821 833 446
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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