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Fight Back Against Domain Squatters
Posted by Kevin Purdy at 1:00 AM on November 14, 2007
Wired's How To Wiki offers some powerful ammunition for dealing with the spam-pushing, typo-leeching domain name squatters that capitalise on slight variations of your personal or business website address. The basic path is to register as many misspellings, abbreviations and variations of your domains as possible and take the miscreants that do pop up to domain name court. There are, of course, ways to reclaim your online name even if the bad guys won't give up, and you can avoid squatter spam yourself by using OpenDNS. But it never hurts to arm yourself with knowledge of the laws and authorities you can turn to when johnsmith.co starts leeching your traffic.
Tags: domain names | how to | how-to | web reputation
Comments (AU Comments · US Comments)
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kc2idf
Posted 10:54 AM 13/11/07
@junyo: I'll keep that in mind. By the way, I have some things for sale cheap. A Camon camera with a Carl Zise lens and Vivitra flash, a KitchenAde food processor, a Dill computer system with a Hulett-Packard printer, lots of good stuff. You can bid for it in my auction on e-bey.
kc2idf
Ugly Joe
Posted 10:38 AM 13/11/07
Fun fact: you have five days to get a refund on any domain name that you register. This little trick leads to the oddly-named practice of Domain Kiting.
I've had a domain snatched out from under me before. Luckily, the site was pretty much dead and nobody visited it aside from me (I was working on restoring it). After the domain got squatted, I took the strategy of not visiting it at all for the next week. Sure enough, the squatters were Kiting, and they let it go. I quickly snatched it back and am happy to have it.
If you have an unpopular domain name get squatted, this strategy might work for you, too.
Ugly Joe
junyo
Posted 10:24 AM 13/11/07
I've never really understood the concept of "domain squatting". You have no divine right to a domain name or user traffic, any more than you have rights to property you didn't purchase or customers that get distracted by another store on the way to yours. Going after someone who's getting traffic due to owning a variation of your product/domain name seems a bit like going after the guy who buys the land between you and the beach and starts throwing up a house that'll ruin your view; sure you can use the government and try to zone him out OR you could've just bought the land yourself if you were that concerned about it. Nowadays if you don't buy the domain as soon as you come up with the trademark, it's kind of your own fault if you get beat to it.
junyo