Domaining Pet Peeves

I have two domaining pet peeves. Actually, I probably have a bunch more, but there are two that I see more often than others.

I get annoyed when I see people trying to sell domain names for exorbitant prices simply because they are similar to a domain name that sold for big bucks. Just because Rick sold Candy.com for $3 million doesn’t mean that the domain name SugaryCandies.net is worth anything. It’s especially silly to see on a domain forum because it either means the seller doesn’t know much about domain names or thinks at least one other person is dumb enough to buy it at that price.

There are great names that are “similar” to Candy.com, such as Sweets.com, Chocolates.com, or even HardCandies.com, but those are great because they are well searched keywords. Just because a name may be similar in appearance doesn’t mean its worth anything close to the original domain that sold – or worth anything at all for that matter. The key to domain value is that it means something and can/should be used commercially.

My other pet peeve is when I see someone referencing Google results without quotes – or part of a Google search when the quoted term makes no sense. In the first case, Google returns every page that has those words on them, but not necessarily in that order. For example, wicked cool bank returns 106,000 results, but the quoted term yields just 2 results.

In the second case, it references part of a term but not the entire term. For example, quoting “York Stock Exchange” and its 6,190,000 results is stupid because people would generally search for “New York Stock Exchange” or “Stock Exchange” rather than “York Stock Exchange.” In my opinion, a name like YorkStockExchange.com, despite its 6m+ results in Google for the keyword, is worth nothing.

What are your pet peeves – (other than domain blogs where the writer complains about pet peeves!)?

BTW – I am away right now, so comments will be moderated when I get an opportunity.