How to Buy a Domain and How it Helps You Protect Your Online Reputation
Your small business is growing. You’re slowly expanding as you gain new customers. Things are exciting right now!
But there are also hidden dangers to contend with. There are those, for example, who are waiting in the wings, ready to try to tear your business down.
There are dozens of reasons why people maliciously attack good businesses. Sometimes, the culprits are competitors or angry ex-employees. But you don’t want to leave yourself open to anyone who has an axe to grind.
It’s time to start purchasing alternate domain names. This is a tactic that is used by most professional online reputation management companies, and it can work for you as well. You want to think about common defamatory domain names that might target a business. Examples include:
- Yourbusinessnamesucks.com
- Yourbusinessnamescam.com
- Yourbusinessnameripoff.com
- Yourbusinessnameissatan.com
You might also want to purchase the extensions for each of these domains. Think about buying up the .biz, .info, .net, .org, .mobi, .me, and .ly for your business name and all of these defamatory variations.
Next, you’ll want to go through this same process for your own name, and for the names of any major products that you put out. If you have any truly visible employees that regularly speak for your business (the way that Matt Cutts regularly speaks for Google) you’ll want to buy up domain names for them, too.
Buying these domains and “parking them” is a relatively inexpensive strategy. You don’t have to fill all of these domains up with any content, even content that praises your company. You’re basically buying the domains so that nobody else can have them. In fact, setting up websites on each of these domains tends to ramp up the expense of this exercise, and can actually harm your reputation. After all, some people won’t click on the site. They’ll just see that somebody is running a “yourbusinesssucks.com” website and assume the worst. Parked domains, by contrast, don’t show up in the SERPs.
Online reputation management is, by necessity, a proactive exercise. Don’t just wish and hope to avoid trouble. Work to keep your good name in tact before trouble arises.
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