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Thursday Jul 20, 2006
An A,B,C of URLs
URLs, like office air conditioning, are normally taken for granted until something goes wrong.
A few years ago www.do-it.org was bought by someone selling Russian brides. It was a URL we should have snapped up when do-it was launched, but somehow it was overlooked. We did finally manage to buy it, but only after months of lengthy negotiations.
Google, it seems, is determined to make sure they have covered every base. According to Neil Patel they own 520 domain names – some to cover their ever expanding empire of products and some (porngoogle.com for example) to stop other people using them.
Some organisations find that their name makes creating a decent URL quite a challenge. Take new youth volunteering charity, v – they have chosen www.wearev.com. Not very memorable, in my opinion, and www.wearev.org.uk and www.wearev.org go elsewhere. Their page ranking (greatly helped by a descriptive URL) isn't the best, either. A Google search for both "v" and "v volunteering" fails to bring the organisation up on the first page.
The real problems come, however, when someone takes a URL close to yours with malicious intent. When the National Association of Volunteer Bureaux was still in existence they found that their .org domain was occupied by something even less savoury than mail order brides, demanding a high fee to surrender the URL. I won't describe exactly what people saw when they happened across navb.org – but the heading was "1,2,3, pee".
Posted by Tom Green ( 2:00 PM ) Link to this post Comments[2]