This advice goes against much of what I’ve said about geodomain names during the past couple of years, but hear me out. I am very interested to hear what David Castello has to say about my rationale – and I look forward to his comment, which I bet will happen soon. There is a time when developing a .ORG geodomain is a smart thing to do.

I will preface this by saying that I believe .org domain names are perceived by Joe Interweb as trustworthy, which is what you need for a website. The problem is that many people confuse .org with .com, and if the topic/content is similar, they are likely to just stay on the .com, patronizing the advertisers and making hotel reservations on that site. It’s easy to lose a potential customer due to confusion if you own the .org and not the .com, which is why I think many organizations own their .com, too, and forward traffic to the .org.

In any case, the perfect time to develop a .org geodomain is when the .com is a fully developed business completely unrelated to the city/town/region. If you visit Concord.com hoping to find information about Concord, New Hampshire, you will end up on Computer Associates’ website, and you will scratch your head and say, “shoot, I thought my buddy told me to go to Concord.com to make my hotel reservation. Shoot – what was that address again?  Oh yeah Concord.org!”

If a person is looking for Lowell.org but types in Lowell.com, I hope that my site will give them more than enough information about Lowell, Massachusetts and they won’t even remember that they were initially looking for Lowell.org.

One example of a great .org domain name to develop is a name I am bidding on at Snapnames, but I probably won’t win. Worcester.org is up for auction (August 3), and I think this is a great domain name to develop because of what I said above. I am having a tough time managing 3 geo websites, so I doubt I’d have time to develop this, too – although I will be bidding less than I think it’s worth just in case.

So why is Worcester.org a great domain name to develop? For starters, I have tried to buy Worcester.com with no luck (even with a serious offer). The domain name is being used for its nameservers right now and doesn’t resolve. Worcester is a great city in central Massachusetts that’s home to a professional minor league hockey team, several colleges, many big companies, and is centrally located, making it great for conferences and events. The Worcester Centrum (now the DCU Center) hosts concerts and other events – I remember commercials for the Monster Truck rallies held their annually.

Anyhow, since it doesn’t appear that Worcester.com will be developed into a geodomain any time soon, I think the .org would make a great acquisition.

There are other similar .org domain names that are ripe for development.

To me, this is common sense, but to many outside of the domain industry, it might not necessarily be standard operating procedure. While developing my geodomains, I worked with a number of local non-profit organizations in order to add free listings to my websites. Oftentimes, the organizations have a website which uses a .org domain name. Generally, I recommend that .com is used when available, but .org is the right choice for most organizations because of the trust factor and consumer awareness of the .org “brand.”

One thing which I’ve also noticed is that a lot of these organizations that use the .org don’t think about registering the .com of their website, and it’s available for anyone to purchase. This is bad in my opinion, and at the least, they should own the .com and forward it to their website. Not only are most people trained to type-in .com, but some web browsers automatically enter the .com at the end of a keyword string. Having the .com unregistered can lead to a bad web browsing experience if the .com is assumed to be the correct address.

Organizations who use .org domain names and leave the .com available to register are taking two risks. The first risk is that a visitor will assume .com, and when they type it in, they will be taken to a page that doesn’t resolve. Additionally, if they leave the .com available, someone with ill-intentions can register it and do a number of malicious things.

When I see this happen, I do my best to let the organization know that registering the .com is important, although I am somewhat surprised at the resistance. Recently, I noticed a few Jewish synagogues owned TempleBethXXXXX.org and the .com was available to register. I ended up buying these domain names and forwarding them on to the .org website as a friendly gesture without telling them. IMO, they probably won’t ever know, but if one person types it in, I am happy to help.

For those who are more technically inclined, I’ve also encouraged organizations to monitor the .com registration (if it’s taken and not developed) using DomainTools and to place a back order for it at Snapnames. Owning the .com is not essential for an organization operating online at a .org, but it’s important.