How to deal with Typosquatters

[retokmeier]

My ecommerce site went live a week ago (http://www.terrakeramik.com). I am using Google adwords and Yahoo sponsored search, as well as other online advertising to drive traffic to my site. I just learned that a Maltuzi Holdings (based in Mountain View, CA), a major typosquatter, has registered a similar site "www dot terraceramic dot com" and is hitting my site daily. Checking in online forums and blogs, I found out that this firm tries to get prospective customers to hit their sites by mis-spelling letitimate domain names and also profiting from Google adwords (not quite sure how). It also appears that Google has dropped me from their organic search results (not the sponsored search).

Question: do any other BH customers have a similar experience with typosquatters and any recommendations how to deal with them? Much appreciated!

[retokmeier]

This post got 58 views but no responses!? :confused:

Anyway, I solved the problem of the typosquatter. Apparently many of them buy domain names in bulk and hope that the owner of the legitimate domain name will approach them to buy the "mis-spelled" domain. Sometimes they forget to pay for the domains. I checked every day on whois.sc and last night the mis-spelled domain became available and I bought it and parked it at BH.
http://www.terrakeramik.com

[billmack]

This post got 58 views but no responses!? :confused:

Anyway, I solved the problem of the typosquatter. Apparently many of them buy domain names in bulk and hope that the owner of the legitimate domain name will approach them to buy the "mis-spelled" domain. Sometimes they forget to pay for the domains. I checked every day on whois.sc and last night the mis-spelled domain became available and I bought it and parked it at BH.
http://www.terrakeramik.com
Sorry to see nobody replied. I'm sure this is a much more common problem than people realize.
This was helpful to me. I'm going to urge an owner of an ecommerce site to register a few other variants of his domain name.

[kaskudoo]

just read it :)
i know the technique and did the same than you ..... just wait and when its available then buy it .... didn't godaddy have a feature, where they monitor it for you and buy it as soon as it becomes available?

[dixieau]

This post got 58 views but no responses!? :confused:
http://www.terrakeramik.com
can only speak for me personally but I don't respond to questions I can't answer that way you are more likely to get a response, if there is a question with 4 or 5 responses I rarely look at it unless it is relevant to what I am here for :)

Also bare in mind that bot's crawl the forum, would that count towards views? not sure, myself.

That is a ***ger of a problem and is actually very common... I refuse to give in and buy the names as it keeps them in business (unless it is really really close)

[retokmeier]

Sorry to see nobody replied. I'm sure this is a much more common problem than people realize.
This was helpful to me. I'm going to urge an owner of an ecommerce site to register a few other variants of his domain name.

Thanks for the replies. I highly recommend purchasing similar domain names (you can get them as cheap as $6) and parking them. These typosquatters are sophisticated and crawl the web for new domains/sites and have an automatic algorithm that will figure out common mis-spellings and register them. Maltuzi Holdings for example has over 70,000 domain names registered. User be warned!

www.terrakeramik.com (http://www.terrakeramik.com)

[Kentj]

My main domain name is dot Net. When I originally got the domain back in 2002 from Go Daddy, the Dot Com was taken but not in use. I bought the dot.net, dot biz, dot.us and dot. uk. I signed up with GoDaddy's program to purchase the dot com domain when it became available but that hasn't worked too well. A domain hoarder and seller purchased it first and put it up for sale..to the tune in the $10's of thousands of dollars. They made a spam web page from the domain with lots of ads. About 6 months ago, it again came up for sale but a major competitor of mine managed to scoop it out from underneath GoDaddy and now it redirects to the competitors site.

I understand that there are legal things that I can do to have them cease and desist, since the domain name is a defacto trademark, but who wants to pay a lawyer for this stuff?

As far as GoDaddy's monitoring service...not very good in my opinion.