Why Do You Need to Buy Multiple Domains?
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Sure, building a site called www.fuzzygreenpair.com, for your signature line of green suede shoes, sounded like a great idea. Then the organic fruit company Fuzzy Green Pear came along, and your traffic hasn’t been the same since. Okay, so this example is fictitious…but it’s very likely something similar has happened to you -- or that it will. Find out why you need to buy multiple domains.
We all make mistakes. Even people who type every single day can mis-hit a key, type a false note or leave out a letter entirely. If you’ve ever tried to visit a well-known site and ended up starting an error page instead, you know exactly why it’s a good idea to buy multiple domains.
Sometimes, people might be genuinely trying to find your site and end up somewhere else. In those cases, owning multiple domains could be the difference between keeping and losing traffic. What does that mean? Learn more about the usage of multiple domain names.
User Error
Alexander Pope said to err is human, and he was right. Everyone makes mistakes, and they make a lot of them when they’re casually cruising the Internet. In fact, you may not even realize that you’re making some of these mistakes. Don’t believe it? Go to your Web browser and type in www.gogle.com. This is an extremely common misspelling of the popular search engine’s URL, which is found at www.google.com.
You’ll find that even when you correctly type out the misspelled Web address, you’re still taken right to Google’s home page. Why is that? The answer is incredibly simple: Google owns multiple domains.
As you can see from the Whois information (pictured above), Google owns gogle.com. As you know from testing it out, this improperly spelled URL still takes you immediately to the right address. This is how Google manages to keep their traffic, even when that traffic is in the wrong. If Google did not own Gogle, traffic might find themselves staring at an error page.
In some cases, the user might simply re-type the URL -- correctly this time -- and carry on. In other cases, however, those same users might go to a different search engine altogether (Ask.com, for example, offers fewer letters to type). To save frustration and missed page hits, Google owns multiple domains. You can’t prevent mistakes, but in some cases you can plan for them.
You might even notice that some canny sites take advantage of these common misspellings. For instance, googgle.com takes you to a search engine that is not owned by Google.com. Bored, tired traffic may not bother to fix the mistake if they arrive at such a site. Want to prevent this from happening to you? It’s time to explore your options for buying domain names.
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