Don`t Make These Common SEO Mistakes! - Domain Disasters
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What could be more basic than your domain name? Perhaps that’s the reason that so many SEO errors revolve around this basic necessity. Maybe it’s because I’m an editor as well as a writer, but to me, one of the more painful mistakes has to be misspelling your domain name. If you’re buying your own domain name, and you know how to spell well, that might not be as big an issue. But if you don’t, or you’re simply telling a web site designer to buy it for you, you can run into some problems.
Kalena Jordan writing for Site Pro News mentioned the client who thought he’d told a designer to buy CartoonCentral.com. The designer heard CarTuneCentral.com. The latter was available; the former was not. But that’s not the only kind of mistake you can get into with spelling. Remember that a domain name doesn’t show up in the browser in CamelType – so think carefully about what it might spell if the capitals fell in a different place. PenIsland.com is a deliberate parody site, but there have been cases of others that weren’t, simply because they didn’t think about what their chosen domains might spell with different stresses.
Let’s move from spelling errors to a canonical matter. I suppose you could still consider this a spelling issue, though. Is your site spelled www.yourdomain.com, yourdomain.com, or www.yourdomain.com/index.html? Think fast, because you get to pick only one. Google, however, will see all three – and its duplicate content alarms will go off. You can avoid this issue by deciding that one site spelling is canonical and using the appropriate redirects for the other spellings. From what I have read, the current consensus for the best URL format to use isn’t any of the ones listed above, but www.yourdomain.com/, with the slash on the end. Whichever format you use, be consistent.
Not all domain debacles come from spelling errors. Some come from math errors – or, more precisely, forgetting to pay the bills. In 1999, Microsoft forgot to renew its Passport.com domain; in 2003, it forgot to renew its Hotmail.co.uk domain. In both cases, generous individuals paid the fees and handed the domains back to the software giant, but not all stories have such a happy ending.
Finally, here are a couple of domain name mistakes I hope most of you know better than to make. The first is buying the .biz version of a domain name when the .com version is available; .com top level domains are still better known and more respected than .biz domains, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. And the second is promoting a site you don’t even own. Make SURE you buy the right site and spell it correctly in all of your marketing literature and advertisements.
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