Typosquatters, the bane of marketers

Many website visits are initiated through direct navigation, where users type the website address directly into the browser address bar. Typos are common in this kind of navigation.

Misspellings

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 websites 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 website. Customers looking for the real acmewidgets.com website might accidentally type the wrong URL and end up one on of the typosquatter's websites.

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 website. These fake websites can do enormous damage to a marketer's brand.

Hurt reputations

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.

Typosquatters use a number of tricks and techniques to try and harvest traffic from users looking for legitimate websites. 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 accidently type in nyspace.com instead of myspace.com or anazon.com instead of amazon.com. 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.

Tricks

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. 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.

I urge companies to 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.

Narrow down

One 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.