Jamie Webb wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 03:15:30PM +0000, Richard Harrison wrote:
>> Forgive me if this is a bit abstract...
>>
>> Say you want to register a internet domain name, and both .com and .co.uk
>> are available, is there a reason to go for one over the other?
>
> You should get both, plus any likely misspellings, plus the other
> gTLDs. Domain names are cheap. Dealing with typosquatters isn't.
Yes, it's common to secure both .co.uk and .com. You ought to model
users as idiots that can't tell the difference between TLDs. The other
.uk TLDs don't have significant mindshare so I would avoid them.
.biz is a tacky 'cute' misspelling, which I personally detest, and .info
doesn't sound general enough to describe all the activities I might want
to use a domain for.
Search engines can tell TLDs apart, so do not copy/proxy/alias one to
the other, as this will split your PageRank in half (assuming you're
going to be setting up a web service). Use Apache RewriteRules to
redirect all additional domains to one primary.
Strangely one of the easiest/cheapest ways to get both UK credentials
and .com global scope is to prepend a uk. subdomain to a .com domain,
for example uk.example.com for UK and
www.example.com for US. I'd
suspect this would not impact PageRank to the same extent but UK users
can see that they are being specifically catered for. Personally at
least, I like to see 'uk' in a domain, even if it's not at the end,
whenever I'm dealing with a site where regionality is important to me.
Dan
