Domain Name the+

[paul]

Do you think it's worth to add "the" with a popular domain name?

[esnail]

do you mean the word 'the' or the symbol '+' ?

[paul]

It's like thehost, themarket likewise..

[DPS Computing]

thegoogle - yep . Depends on the original domain I guess.

[paul]

No trademark domain name, just I thought by adding "the" word it may increase the semantic value of domain and also I may get more chances to get some good domain name.

[Fidget]

Its not usually done, mainly I guess because of corporate identity or marketing. There must be exceptions, such as names which must include the word 'the' (film titles, band names and the like come to mind), but bear in mind that the word 'the' is not one that is used in search engine searches, in fact it is actively ignored even if you use it in a search string (with the only exception of using quotes in the search string). So, it has no use for Search Engine Optimization whereas domain names usually do have a value in SEO (albeit very small).

Talking of semantic value of domains, there is good money to be made in parking domains at the popular domain brokers (i.e. Sedo and Afternic). Picking a good name that will generate income is something of an art in itself though. I've earnt income from domain names that are based around typos of well known and established domains (I wont give an example of any of my own, but imagine how many hits gogle.com could generate, all you need then is a few clickthroughs and you are earning money). In my experience the biggest payouts tend to be with adult and gambling domains, its usually a few cents per click, but a lot of clicks produce income over time.

A lot has been made of the domain after-market over recent years, with examples of sales worth millions of pounds for single domain names, but they really are incredibly rare. There are many free domain appraisal websites out there but they really do tend to over exaggerate the value of a name. And going back to the original question, if you were to enter a name into one of those websites with and without the word 'the' I really don't believe you would see any improvement in the suggested price, if anything you are more likely to see a drop in price where 'the' had been added because it can dilute the focus of the name (if you see what I mean?).

If you want to earn money from this kind of thing, you'll see better results by designing and building a good website for the domain and selling it as a package. I have a client who does this full time and makes around £200 per website on average (they are all turnkey shopping websites using APIs from the likes of Amazon). A couple of those a week would keep the wolf from the door.



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[paul]

Thanks Fidget for clarification, you've nicely eleborated this, I got the point.

[Fidget]

You are most welcome.

Maybe I should elaborate on the Search Engine Optimization value of a domain name a bit. In more recent years/months search engines have been able to take domain names apart. For example, findmoney.tld can now be seen by search engines as 'find' and 'money' (two separate words). I am not sure if all search engines can do this, but do know that the main ones can (I don't have the time right now to produce an example, it might take a little while as the SEO value of the name is still quite small so it would involve a lot of searching). In previous years, you had to hyphenate the names to get the SEO value (i.e. find-money.tld rather than findmoney.tld).

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[daledavies]

Ah fair do's I never knew that! I always asumed SE's would see the words seperately in a domain. For example if you were to search for "money pot" the SE would see those words in a domain such as "potofmoney.com".

[paul]

I think that is related with LSA which gauge the semantic value through word-passage, word-word and passage-passage relations which are correlated with cognitive phenomenon that associate with semantic similarity. Like for example Christ is Bob's father and Maria is Sally's mother the search engine correlate and find similarity something like this “Maria is Bob's Mother”, the kin relationship between Christ and Sally is being put into the shadow.

[DPS Computing]

The best way to make money from these domains is to try and get a popular domain name, in a not so popular TLD - these are normally the best ways of trying to make money out of domains however its not going to be in the millions but will probably be quite a bit more than the £9 or so you pay to register it for a year.

[Fidget]

Yes, that's one way of doing it, although some fo the major websites will slap a court order on you for breaching their trademarks or copyrights.

I have a few domains that consist of the popular name with the www in front (but no . ), such as wwwdomain.com - they get some traffic (obviously from those who suffer dyslexic fingers )

At the end of the day, you have to be careful not to stir anyone into taking you to task over riding on the back their trademark names.

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[DPS Computing]

I suppose your right about the trademarks. And the wwwdomain.com idea was good - you just got a little bit more traffic - I had to check it out! .

I remember loads of people taking Microsoft for a lot of money by registering domains such as windows2000.com and selling them to Microsoft for above the market value.

I think if you are dealing with huge companies they would rather pay you off to a certain extent as they can't be bothered wasting money or more importantly their time if they can just get it off you out of court.

I belive recently there has been some controversy with certain "Vista" domains and companies and individuals claiming they had the websites before Windows Vista had even been announced.

[paul]

Yea if they will ask something like $10000 they can pay as the cost of legal process will be more than that for corporates and they will avoid hassle too but who is going to take the risk?