I work for a small business and like most things its a competitive market. We have a Registered business and our website is the same. Thinking ahead at the time of registering our web Domain I registered a bunch of others that were similarly named, in case a user mistyped the name or something. I also found a few variations of our competitors that they hadn’t registered, and registered them.

Over the past year or so I’ve noticed a load of Affiliate websites show up, which has created more competition in the Organic search listings. These sites don’t offer any products, they look like they do but they just pass you on to someone else and earn a commission if you buy.

So, it got me thinking, we’ve got a bunch of Domains which we could develop into websites and have some useful content on them, our content with our products. But I wanted to know whether we would need to register these web domain names as separate businesses?

Anyone with any experience in this?

No, you don’t have to register them as separate businesses. Worth making sure you’ve got unique content on each of them though, or google may dismiss them as spam.

I don’t know anything about business names (presumably you’d have to openly trade as whatever your trading name was?) but your domain name can be whatever you want(*). There’s nothing that says you have to tie the two together, you could promote a hairdressing salon on http://www.greatfriedfishdeals.com for the difference it makes.

(* – so long as you’re not infringing on known brands anyway, there’s restrictions on such things these days)

I’d like to know the website strategy of the client testimonial shown on the RHS of this company’s website

(http://www.accidentclaims.org/)

Website designer not been paid, perhaps?

I concur with what’s being said.

If you are really going to get into the world of syndicated external content and such like (a pretty murky area), it’s pretty involved – I would get an expert in.

If you just want to have different ways of displaying the same content (perhaps to different markets) then this is pretty common and is straightforward (you can have the data shared, but the wrappings different).

lol@drlex and his angry web designer

Thanks all. We won’t syndicate any external content, but just as you say Alex, our won content in a different wrapping.

Regarding infringing on brands, are we safe to use our own content, products, Privacy Policy etc on a domain that is similar to a competitors? Obviously we won’t use their logo’s or anything?

eg:Theirs is http://www.gotoshop.co.uk ours is http://www.go2shop.co.uk

You would be better off speaking to professionals about this IMO.

As johndoh says – copying other people’s work is definitely going to require specialist legal knowledge.

If you came to me and asked me to do it, I would refuse on ethical grounds. Plus I’m not sure it’s that great a business strategy.

On the other hand, their homepage looks like google and the rest of their site (roomhub.co.uk) looks like a generic off-the-shelf web store, so their IP isn’t particularly well formed or unique.

In the short term I would at least get all the domain names that you own pointing to the main website. At the moment if someone does type in the wrong address by accident they get the BT holding page whereas it might as well link to your site.

I’m basing this on the http://www.go2shop.co.uk link provided above.

I’d be very cautious about setting up multiple domains for the sake of one. You’re far better off putting all your efforts into one above board ‘proper’ site than several dubious efforts. Google (and t’other search engines) like things to be done properly – trying to dupe them is a long and dangerous trail. If your content/product/service/SEO is all set up and managed properly then you should rank well.

Jim – outsrc.co.uk

Concentrate on the website for your business, if you are actually selling stuff on there you should do ok. Making other websites is just going to detract attention from your proper one.

Sorry,those web addresses were just made up,but the principle i was trying to explain is the same…the ‘to’ and ‘2’ or hyphenated variations.
The other domains all forward to our main site already but I was just curious whether it would be worthwhile doing more with them.

JimbobSwan has it I think. If it’s not your own product then the best you can do is create an affiliate site. If it is your own product then you are better putting the work into your own site. if you do try and create fake sites that link to yours then you risk diluting your own value with Google if they think that’s what you are up to. Also in order to get value from thinks from those sites you then have to work on the value of those sites themselves. I doubt it is worth it nearly as much as spending the time creating links back to your site on the web