Driving Your Internet Traffic: the Hazards of Direct Navigation
How did you get here? Seriously, how did you navigate to this web page? Is DuetsBlog.com in your bookmarks? (Do you have an Internet "loop"?) Perhaps you navigated directly by going to the little box at the top of the page and typing in "www.duetsblog.com." If you did this last step, and did it without mistyping, congratulations. You directly navigated to this page. Those that mistyped might have gone here or here or here. (Hopefully those people will join us soon.)
Many domainers capitalize on the mistakes Internet users make when directly navigating to web pages, and policing this activity can be tiresome because there are so many ways to make mistakes, like these:
- A sticky key, like www.niike.com.
- Swapped letters from typing too fast, like www.weahter.com.
- An omitted letter, like www.kellggs.com. (Would you know at first glance that this is not the official Kellogg's site?)
- A QWERTY typo, where one of your fingers accidentally hits a key adjacent to one you intended to type, like www.homedepor.com. Or perhaps you hit two adjacent keys, like www.homedeport.com.
A business or organization that relies on heavy Internet traffic, like amazon.com, should own a wide variety of typographical variants of its domain name(s). Amazon.com, Inc. owns thousands of domain names, and most of them are variants of amazon.com. In fact, it is pretty difficult to find a typographical variant of amazon.com that does not take you to amazon.com. (And if you've read this far, you've killed enough time already that you might as well try it.)
The upshot is that a business or organization can either let domainers typosquat on its domain names, or it can capture its own typo traffic.
Untrill nxet weeek . . .
