Marketers developing an online presence should act to safeguard themselves against 'typosquatters' who register common misspellings of popular domain names with a view to hijacking Web traffic from legitimate businesses.
That's the word from Gian Visser, CEO of Afrihost. He said many Web site visits are initiated through direct navigation where users type the Web site address directly into the browser address bar and typos are common in this kind of navigation.
Some sources estimate that up to 20% of directly typed in Web addresses have a typo in them. Unscrupulous companies and individuals register misspellings of brand and business names as domains with a view to setting up Web sites where they can monetise this traffic.
For example, if a company was known as acmewidgets.com, the typosquatter might register the acnewidgets domain and point this domain to his own Web site. Customers looking for the real acmewidgets.com Web site might accidentally type the wrong URL and end up one on of the typosquatter's Web sites.
Said Visser: "The reason that the typosquatter would want to do this is to offer pay-per-click advertising on the domain to generate ad revenues, or a devious competitor might try to typosquat and point traffic towards its own Web site. These fake Web sites can do enormous damage to a marketer's brand."
A typosquatter's site may contains pornographic images and links, or 'mousetrap' your hapless customers into clicking several pop-up ads before they can escape. The customer might give up trying to reach your company in disgust, perhaps unaware that he typed in an incorrect Web address. This could hurt the company's reputation and cost you lost sales or lost advertising revenues.
Visser said typosquatters use a number of tricks and techniques to try and harvest traffic from users looking for legitimate Web sites.
One of the most common is to register alternative domain names to the real URL based on typos made by pressing one or two adjacent letters on the keyboard.
For example, a user might type in nyspace.com instead of myspace.com or anazon.com instead of amazon.com by accident. Alternatively, a typosquatter might sit on a domain with a letter missing from the real URL - for example, amzon.com instead of amazon.com - or swap some letters around - amazno.com.
The typosquatter may also register variations on a brand domain name in order to grab some of the business's traffic. Even a misplaced hyphen or dot could lead a user to a typosquatter's domain, said Visser. Another trick is to register a .net, co.za or .org address that uses a different top-level domain from the original - for example amazon.net or amazon.biz instead of amazon.com.
Visser said that companies should safeguard their brands against typosquatting by identifying variations of their domains that are likely to be the most common typo errors and then work to register and acquire those domains. They should look into the most common typing errors and work out which typo domain names are most likely to get the most traffic and which ones cybersquatters are most likely to seize.
"It would cost a fortune to register every possible misspelling of your company's name as a domain, but you can narrow the list down substantially through logic and research," said Visser.
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