Good Strategy, but Poor Execution
Buying domain names that are confusingly similar to your brand or product is a smart move that many companies don’t consider. However, owning domain names that are confusingly similar to your brands, but not forwarding that traffic to your main website is just plain stupid!
Extra TV, an NBC television show and a Warner Brothers Entertainment production has a feature called Luxaholics, and WB owns the corresponding domain name Luxaholics.com. Thumbs up to them for inventing a term, buying the matching domain name, and then branding the term. They also showed intelligence by purchasing the domain name Luxaholic.com as well. Unfortunately, this domain name goes to a dead page.
Come on WB!! Smarten up and forward the alternative domain name to the main page! It might not mean much additional traffic, but it certainly doesn’t cost anything extra to do it.
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Comments (2)
Jamie
February 11th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I think one of the biggest mistakes but very similar to what you pointed out but on a different site.. eLoan.com which owns the plural eLoans.com and never forwarded it until recently. They also had cName record issues as well, since only http://www.eloans.com did the forward and not eloans.com with out the www.
Now today, eLoans.com shows an error page again.. lol
So it’s always good to check and make sure your domain with or without www. works.
Elliot Silver
February 11th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
“So it’s always good to check and make sure your domain with or without http://www. works.”
@Jamie – I agree… sometimes an incorrect subdomain can also lead to an ISP landing page.
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