.co Customers of .CO are landing on my .COM

[alien51]

I have three .COM domains that have seen a sudden spike in web traffic the past months.

After some investigation, i found out that some "end-user" websites have sprouted lately on a .CO extension with exactly the same domain name as my .COM.

Unfortunately for these .CO website owners, their customers are clicking on my .COM domains instead of theirs.

And i have an inkling that any of these guys did send to me an email before asking me how much to buy my .COM domain. They turned down and perhaps have decided to launch their brand on a .CO extension instead. But too bad a lot of their search traffic is going my way instead.

This is now giving me the motivation to up the ante and further develop these specific .COM domains to keep the .CO guys down the Google order.

I still have the top spot as of now. And looks like their customers are confused. Evenif you plaster XXXX.CO on some highway billboard, people would think it was some kind of a typo error, go to the internet and visit XXXX.COM instead.... which i own.

This could prove that putting up something on a .CO extension could be a bad idea.

 

[biggie]

This could prove that putting up something on a .CO extension could be a bad idea.

or, they could be hoping develop, in an effort to lay claim your .com


but i think many felt .co would yield typo traffic from .com, but that hasn't shown to be evident.

even when overture was still active, searching .com typo lists didn't yield .co as the typo extension, compared to ".xom" and ".cpm"

 

[Dave]

Theres no doubt that end users will take time to get used to .CO. Every end user/non-techie I have ever mentioned a .co domain to have all looked at me in confusion and said "Umm..did you mean .com?". In my opinion the majority of .co sales have just been .com owners hoping to protect their .com or domainers.

 

[SiberForum]

This could prove that putting up something on a .CO extension could be a bad idea.

This had also made you a cybersquatter or some kind of this. I agree, .co is not any better than .com

 

[Technaut]

people around my area have trouble understanding .net and .org. They think everything is .com. When people like that see .co it doesnt register, they just see .com instead

 

[RJ]

It's been happening for many years with .ORG .NET .COM.AU, etc, when they are advertised by radio, TV and especially word of mouth. I would think the case is even more so for .CO where it already looks like a typo of .COM.

The "right side of the dot" is just as much of a marketing tool as the left side and I don't see any positive marketing message from a TLD that looks like a typo of another. DotBZ is another that does it.

On the flip side, you will get the occasional typo of the .COM going to the .CO. Does it all balance out in the end?

RJ

 

[alien51]

This had also made you a cybersquatter or some kind of this.

Now that you've mentioned it, i now have a much better appreciation of "cybersquatters". lol

In my case, i bought a farmland that nobody seems interested with. Then after some time, a shopping mall developer came along, tried to buy me out, won't pay my price, then starts calling me a squatter. I mean, where was he when this place was still an undeveloped piece of land???

---------- Post added at 04:55 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:46 PM ----------

On the flip side, you will get the occasional typo of the .COM going to the .CO. Does it all balance out in the end?

Maybe occasionally. But occasionally insignificant, i would presume.

Based on my log stats, most of the traffic on my COM sites have typed the "XXXX" keyword by itself on search. They didn't type "XXXX.COM" or "XXXX.CO". A significantly smaller portion were direct type-in traffic. And about 2% typed the entire "XXXX.COM" on Google. While less than 2% typed the "XXXX.CO" on Google (but saw my domain on the top of search results so he clicked my domain first).

I'm planning to harvest this sudden surge of traffic by building my COMs into affiliate sites, and fending-off the .CO websites into lower search ranking.