You Real.ly Need to Stop This URL Hacki.ng
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010
Why in the world would you handicap your company like this?
So I’m reading this story about ShopSocial.ly today and I’m scratching my head. The new social shopping web site is branding itself as ShopSocial.ly rather than ShopSocially.
Thankfully, the company has the domain name ShopSocially.com, which it then forwards to ShopSocial.ly. But this is still a big mistake. The company is relying on the Libyan country code to base its entire business. All of the SEO and all of the hosting points to a .ly country code domain name.
Perhaps this will give the company a leg up when someone in Libya searches for social shopping?
Surely this move isn’t to save people from typing three extra letters (com) on the URL. It must be trying to be “cute” and piggyback on web 2.0 naming conventions.
But if I were looking to invest in this company, the fact that its foundation is the Libya ccTLD would be one of my number one risk factors. One policy change and they could lose it overnight. (Yes, same thing for Bit.ly.)
Further Reading:
Yes, this is a high and unnecessary risk to take.
Who would have thought that Libya’s extension would become this popular…
if their admin team see typin traffic on .com and .ly may be they will realize .com is better choice for them.
Libya….LOL.
The stability of that gov’t in the linchpin of their success.
At least Libya is more peaceful these days, but still. I would not put millions of dollars behind a domain that Libya has a say-so on.
Domaining is still the Wild West and examples like this prove it. Anything can happen.
I am about to launch a website under a keyword.me domain. The keywordme.com is taken and parked, the owner doesn’t respond. Still, my bootstraping status doesn’t allow me to spend much on domain acquisitions.
I guess I’ll have to trademark keywordme in order to prevent anyone from using it in the same industry.
Any hints would be appreciated.
Does it mean you don’t favor .CO? For all intents and purposes, to market .CO as abbreviation for “company” is a hack . . .
@ Louise – a hack is when you make the domain extension part of your domain.
@ Magneto – if your keyword is obvious as to the content of the web site, you probably won’t get very far in the trademarking process.
Thanks Andrew. The verb is an abbreviation of a longer word. The abbreviation-word comes up in dictionaries as “informal”.
Magneto-best to contact a trademark attorney.
You ought to be able to at least obtain a registration on the Supplemental Register; which still provides worthwhile protection.
As I am not an attorney, this is of course not legal advice.
Unusual choice. People usually go for .COM.
What is Pet.co? Safe.co? Those might be considered hacks, right? But anything else .co, even if there is “company” in the title, is not a hack?
With regard to today’s posts on ICANN & Verisign, sorry, but ccTLD’s can’t pose more of a risk than .com’s and .nets.
My health site, LoseWith dot me isn’t a hack? It’s a sentence, not a word.
Is Wool.Pants.com a hack for wool pants, instead of woolpants.com?
How about wool.co.at? That’s a hack, right?
My favorite: dot-me.of-cour.se <== It's actually a blog about dot me. Is that funny? A blog about dot me with the dot se extension! LOL!
Seriously….
Webmaster Tools lets you designate your sites origin – country code is really irrelevant these days with SEO.
There really isn’t much in the ‘Lybians’ control LOL.
Hacks are harmless and fun, especially if you also secure the dot com. I’ve done tests with hack domains and for social media and the younger demographic, hacks go down a treat.
@ Tim – not according to Google, which says country codes are the most important factor in determining location:
http://domainnamewire.com/2010/05/18/cctld-most-important-factor-in-google-location-determination/
Type in a major or category killer domain into google, you won’t see a page full of dot coms.
The only disadvantage to using a hack is some lost type in traffic but if you own the dot com anyways then what do you lose?
Like google, people pay attention to relevance not whethe your site is from Lybia. Domainers might, but end users will more than likely remember it because its a point of difference.
At the end of the day, domains are becoming less and important in G’s eyes, its all about relevance, fresh content, reputation and inbound links plus domain age. If you had a hack domain and got some publicity for using it, you could find yourself with 100,000 backlinks straight off the bat.
I just fail to see the downside.
Cheers!
Sorry i meant cat killer keyword