A recent fiasco over a sound alike domain name has again reminded web site owners that buying the .co.uk and .com extensions is not necessarily enough to protect their brand and reputation.
The issue was brought to the fore by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) when they took action against a Home Office radio advertising campaign. The ads were promoting thinkUknow.com, but what hadn’t been considered properly was how the domain would sound over the airwaves.
Listeners in non-text messaging mode had mistaken the domain for thinkYOUknow.com, a web site registered to someone else and which was solely a paid for advertising page containing some links to adult material. As if that isn’t bad enough, there’s another toe-curling twist…the Home Office radio campaign was designed to promote safe web browsing for children.
Belatedly, the Home Office commissioned site now has, to an extent, some but not all of the domain name bases covered. For while a number of alternative domain names may now point to thinkUknow.com, Google is still serving up the ad link site as the number two result if you enter thinkYOUknow as a search term. And, according to Google, the thinkYOUknow site was last crawled by the search engine on September 26. The content of this ad link site is still clearly uploaded onto publicly accessible web space, even if the domain name is pointing elsewhere. And even now two thinkuknow domain extensions and one thinkyouknow domain are still available to register.
What the episode demonstrates is that to protect your online brand, a good deal of lateral thinking is required to ensure web site traffic isn’t hijacked by sound alike or mis-spelt domain names. In addition to .co.uk and .com, think about common brand or company misspellings you have noticed, say, in correspondence from customers. Consider, too, alternative and hyphenated spellings and even text messaging lingo. Registering a few more domains is not a great financial burden, and could be money well spent in ensuring no-one, wittingly or unwittingly, can siphon off your hard won traffic.
