In my never ending quest to provide supporting evidence for the value of generic, keyword domains… here are this weeks addition to the list of companies that are taking advantage of this strategy to dominate the market by associating their product or service with a keyword or phrase.
- Flu.com goes to Flumist.com (pharmasutical product)
- Fruit.com is the Fruit of the Loom website
- WorldCup.com points to fifa.com
- Skin.com points to MrSkin.com (the good parts of the movies)
- Clothes.com is a Zappos.com site
- Pirates.com goes to pittsburgh.pirates.mlb.com
- TeethWhitener.com goes to Pluswhite.com
- Foods.com forwards to familyfun.go.com/recipes
- Beverages.com to Kraftrecipes.com
- Family.com loads up family.go.com
8 comments
Most companies are still missing the boat with their keyword domains though. By simply forwarding the url all they are capturing is the type-in traffic or direct links. In contrast, by developing Clothes.com, Zappos or one of their smart affiliates (different whois info for clothes.com and zappos.com) is able to garner search engine traffic that blows away the type-in. Clothes.com has an Alexa of about 1M and a PR of 5.
I discovered a site a few weeks ago which facilitates the placement of forms on websites. It is a nice application to use for lead generation websites. I signed up for a free account and placed a sample form on a test site. But I hadn’t visted the app site in over a week. I was trying to remember the name, typing what I could recall into Google with no luck. Was it woomoo, wumoo, wumu, wamoo, wafoo, etc? It turns out to be wufoo.com but IMO that is a good example of why short generic domains are better than brandables with no meaning.
@Tom, I was just talking about that in a post last week where one of my clients was asking why a pointed domain wasn’t showing up in google. To your point, Clothes.com would be a perfect example to demonstrate the difference in value between forwarding and developing.
@Leonard, the same has happened to me with some brandables. There are some good ones but overall, generic wins.
I usually forward my good domains to my principal websites, because developping them will need time and content.
Thanks for the post!
Out of interest is there any way of forwarding traffic without loosing search engine rankings completely. I am in the process of creating a single site to replace a bunch of other sites in the same genre. My question is can I forward the old domain and retain some search engine traffic in addition to the type-ins? Like bydomainers I dont really want to maintain the other websites and would prefer to redirect. Any hot tips guys?
@Leonard I personally use emailmeform.com on slabaugh.org.
@Jim To attempt to maintain your page rank, you should look into using a 301 redirect. This is usually best done through an htaccess file. If you Google ‘301 redirect htaccesss’ you’ll probably find the info you need. I’ve heard some SEO pundits say that the full page rank is not completely retained in some cases.
Not the earlier tom, first off.
I don’t know if I’d say a porn site is a good use of a domain. Skin.com could go to dermatological information. Sex.com could go to sex education (I’ve thought that for some time). Too bad .edu is reserved, because sex.edu would be great. They use .gov for some government based educational programs :-/