Typosquatting: A Search Engine Marketing Menace

Typosquatting is a major cause of concern in search engine marketing. What typosquatters do is to take advantage of the common typographical mistakes that Internet users commit when typing a URL on their browser’s address box. The aim of most typosquatters is to steal traffic from the website they are hounding and redirect them to their own websites. This kind of traffic theft can cause problems in a company’s search engine marketing campaign.

Is the damage caused by typosquatting enough to matter? The answer to that is yes. We all know that one of the goals of search engine marketing is to drive traffic to a targeted website successfully. Traffic is important in search engine marketing; after all, traffic is where the money is. The mere fact that typosquatters steal traffic from the website they are hounding already means loss of profits, and these losses can amount to millions.

But that is not all the damage that typosquatters can cause the website they are hounding. In search engine marketing, domain names are chosen because they are tied up with the specific brand name, trademark or image of the company that owns the domain. A typosquatter can potentially damage the image and credibility of the company whose domain it is squatting.

For example, if a typosquatter registers a porn website using the common typing mistakes made when typing in the URL of a popular children’s website and children accidentally access this porn website, it can cause uproar among parents. Eventually, the precious Internet traffic that the people behind the search engine marketing campaign of the children’s website are seeking to drive to the website is suddenly driven away from it instead. This scenario can truly become a search engine marketing nightmare.

It is very important for search engine marketing practitioners to do what they can to protect the integrity of their clients’ domain names from these menacing typosquatters. Fighting typosquatters is certainly possible and can certainly be done successfully. When a typosquatter from Russia tried to squat the Google domain, Google filed a complaint with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Google cited that this typosquatter is infringing on the Google image and trademark. ICANN has sided with Google after a mere two-month deliberation.

The best way for search engine marketing practitioners to protect their clients against typosquatting is to analyse and identify possible typing mistakes that can be made on their client’s domain name. And then, they should convince the client to buy these domains and install a program that can redirect traffic from these mistyped URLs to the main website of the client. It is expensive, but this kind of protection is certainly worth the cost. For as long as the website exists and does not drop, the protection will definitely hold.

Search engine marketing practitioners should take the issue of typosquatting seriously. After all, loss of traffic to a client’s website due to typosquatting is a serious matter. It is imperative that search engine marketing practitioners to stop typosquatting before the typosquatters actually start.

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Typosquatting: A Search Engine Marketing Menace

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