Domain Name Does and Don’ts

Some really new domain name points of interest
There is really something to be said when we continue to read about the domain name industry and dispite the fact that domain names have been around for a long time now with the first being issued on 03/15/1985 SYMBOLICS.COM.
Since 1985 actually in fact here is a list of the first issued domain names oldest registered domain name so it is really great that after 23 years there is a lot of talk about domain names both online which we expected but in important print media like Forbes Magazine and the Wall Street Journal to mention just a couple.

At Viper Logic we owned our first name around 1995 but we no longer have it because our company name changed and we got rid of it of course this was before we realized you should never sell a domain name because their day or 15 minutes of fame are not upon us yet. We also now know that the longer a domain name is registered with the same owner the stronger point score it received from your favorite search engine as being a stable company and age is important to these engines in their site scoring which all goes towards your sites (SERP) Search Engine Page Rank.

We have been buying domain names before 1997 and we actually looked one up to share it here ItsTheBest.com was bought in April 1997 and just thought we would share this with our friends.

Domain Names you should never buy
Boy after being in the domain name investment world for as long as we have we are still constantly learning some things that can make your business run better and learning things to keep us and you out of harms way. Welcome to a new one for us, new for us because we never buy or register a domain name that uses hyphens (Example here Viper-Logic.com) mainly because we did not want to have to communicate verbally and here is why as and example we have a radio spot that runs and they always say please visit our software engineering sponsor ViperLogic.com Software Engineering but if we had compromised and bought Viper-Logic.com then the radio commercial which is really done very cool and well read like, would have went like this please visit our software engineering sponsor Viper “Hyphen” Logic.com. You can clearly read and see what happens when you compromise.

Next we just found out that people actually buy domain names with two hyphens in them and this is ridiculous for several reasons that come to mind to us. First of all we believe buying a domain name with a hyphen is not wise, it is a compromise. Let logic share that the purchase of a domain name is the absolute first thing you are going to do to be on the Internet and be truly independent even if you have a site with groups or social networks because if you build a site under these organizations you are never truly free from them as they have the ultimate power over your site.

Two Hyphen domain names are not allowed is harsh they are not excepted on the search engines for indexing. The only traffic you are going to receive from owning a two hyphen domain name is going to come from print media, television and radio. Because you were not wise to double compromise by having two hyphens your message in all other then online media is destine to fail because getting someone to remember to type in one hyphen is bad enough, getting them to type in twp hyphens is shall we say impossible.

Example
Imagine that you are Viper--Logic--Software.com and you run an ad campaign on radio here would be the vocals for that radio spot please visit our software engineering sponsor Viper “Hyphen” Hyphen” Logic “Hyphen” Hyphen” Logic.com and you can see this would be a great excuse to use hyphens if your company name is hyphen.

.info domain names are not informative
We have all heard the old adage that if something is too good to be true it probably is and we have another one if it is too cheap there is usually a good reason so we welcome you to the .99 cent .info domain name. Who buys any domain name except a .com is a real mystery to us until we asked people that have them why they bought them on webmaster forums like the DP that stands for Digital Point by in large the most popular forum or playground for web masters there is and you can visit it here Webmaster forums because Logic is a member and my handle on the DP forum is but of course Logic.

Webmaster Forum .info two part Question
Here is where what should have been a straight answer to our question that we posted like this one here “Do you own .info domain names and if so why? Next we said if the .com was available would you have bought the .info instead?” and our straight question got answers that became anything but the straight truth.

Webmaster Forum two part Answer
The reply postings to our questions were anywhere from the .info was cheaper to I could not find a good .com domain name for the first part of the question and they all answered the second part of our two part post with a NO to why would I buy the .info if I could buy the .com.

This is the death of anyone wanting to truly build a reliable site based on the answers the death word in this article is “compromise” because the domain name is the beginning of the site we are going to build and there are over 100 other factors like incoming links, content for the site and (SEO/SEM) Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing to mention a few that also determine a sites success or failure.

We have never seen a single site that utilizing a .info extension and furthermore we have not seen actually any popular or successful sites using anything beyond the .com, .net or .org extensions and we have only seen two sites using a hyphen that are semi successful for now but with the search engine bots constantly getting smarter this may only take a matter of time as we are in the know about how the search engines are suspicious about the use of hyphens.

Domain Name investing fast tips
A great word of advise is to own a domain name that is short two words that go together like ViperAuthority.com or less (one word domain names are expensive) has a .com ending no hyphens and is easy to verbally communicate. Going just a step or two further the two words should have meaning and be easy to spell by your potential visitor as well you need to keep the overall letter count low the shorter the domain name the better and please re-frame from using numbers at all cost.
To learn greater in-depth information about selecting a domain name please visit our Domain Name Education Center. Domain Name Education Center