Yesterday, a friend of mine called to ask for my advice about whether or not to buy all the variations of his domain name. For example mygreatdomain.com, mygreatdomain.net, mygreatdomain.ca, my-great-domain.com, my-great-domain.net…..and so on ad nauseum.

Now, there are a few reasons for going through this exercise. The primary reason given is to protect your name. To prevent a competitor from coming along and using your domain name but only changing the ending.  Dot net instead of dot com.They might do this in hopes of drawing traffic away from your site.

A second reason is to try to scoop up extra traffic. The thinking here is that if someone type in mygreatdomain.net instead of mygreatdomain.com they will still get to your site.

A third and by no means the final reason is; to be listed more often in search engines.

Now, here’s my take on the situation. First, think about this….who does having more domain names REALLY benefit?

Yes, there is the odd time where having .net, info, .org might prevent some yahoo from dragging your name through the mud. Protecting yourself in this way is more important if you are a big name like IBM or Heinz. For the rest of us, not so much. It is also important if your website is one that creates controversy.

The second situation; hoping more people will find you with multiple names, is somewhat flawed. The vast majority of people will type .com without even thinking about it. If your website is more appropriately classified as an .org type then yes, having the .com will help you. However, the reverse is not true.

The third situation is equally flawed. Consider this, Google’s little search spiders or bots are smart enough to detect duplicate content. In other words lets say I post this article here and then tomorrow I post it again, unchanged, to articles.com. Within a few days Google will pick up on this, compare the dates of issue along with a few other factors and decided which page will show in the search engine results. Pretty sophisticated, eh? Well, same holds true for domain names. If you were to post your content on 3 identical pages with .com, .net and .org two of those pages are likely to get booted by Google. There are a few ways to configure this to avoid problems but not really any way to pick up extra advantage.

It is my opinion that in most cases the only one that benefits from having multiple domain names is the one that sells the names.

Yes, they will present all kinds of pretty logic to help you believe it is a good thing…

Don’t fall for it!