Domain Name Registrar Leeching Traffic From Facebook Domain Typo’s
The purchase of domain name mis-spells of popular sites for type-in traffic by domainers is not an uncommon practice (in fact I often laugh at the owners of popular domain who fail to register the mis-spells of their own domains because it is so cheap to register the domains). Since there is big money in this sort of activity, it comes as no surprise that the domain registrars themselves are participating in these activities.
Tonight when logging into my Facebook account, I accidentally “fat fingered” the URL and entered www.Facebok.com, instead of www.Facebook.com. In doing so I was not taken to Facebook, I was taken to GoDaddy.com; one of the worlds leading domain name registrars. Given the popularity of Facebook, one can imagine how much traffic GoDaddy.com is receiving on a daily basis from those who made the exact same mistake that I did. What surprised me the most was not the fact that GoDaddy.com was registering Facebook domain mis-spells, but the fact that Facebook did not register these mis-spells especially since they have been aggressive in recovering Facebook related domain names.
Where are other Facebook.com Mis-spells Redirecting to?
After discovering this, I decided to take a moment to where other “popular” Facebook.com are being re-directed to:
- www.fcebook.com - redirects to WhosOnMySpace.com, a site that offers a MySpaxce profile tracker.
- www.faebook.com - redirects to Amazon.com
- www.faceboook.com - redirects to College.com a Facebook 1.0 social networking start-up.
- www.fscebok.com - goes to a Sedo.com hosted landing page.
- www.facebpok.com - goes to an online personals landing page.
- www.facenook.com - goes to ad filled Yearbok landing page
The thing with domain mis-spells is that there are a ton of them, so registering every single one might be difficult, but the fact that four very obvious mis-spells are re-directing to a Facebook competitor or a large online company, leads me to believe that Facebook is missing the ball when it comes to their domain name strategies and are doing their users a dis-service (or possibly losing users) to more domain name savvy competitors and companies.
Any one know of a way to tell exactly how many hits a URL gets each month without owning it?
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2 comments ↓
very interesting blog. Funny you mention it. I actually am a member on www.College.com but had no idea that they also had traffic directed faceboook.com….Clever
@ Sam - I have noticed that many companies are doing this in many different marketplaces. This is an excellent strategy and I am sure that for many of the companies having these redirects result in some decent traffic each month.
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