Domain Squatting - Part 1: How To Identify A Squatter

Part one of this article explains how to find a squatter who owns a domain which infringes on a brand, trademark or website that you own, and how Voodoo Ltd can do this work for you.

Part two examines what to do when you have found one, and the legal processes that Voodoo Ltd can help you with to get the domain back from the squatter once you have decided to go down that route.

Otherwise known as ‘Cyber Squatting’, domain squatting is the act of registering, trafficking in or using a domain name with bad intent (or without authorisation) to profit from the good name of a organisations trademark, brand or identity.

This can commonly be a URL with a different domain extension (e.g. ‘.co.uk’ and ‘.com’), or a misspelling of a URL (e.g. www.gogole.com).

Phonetic Misspellings

Take your domain name, and check it for possible mispronunciations of your website. For example, a phonetic mispronunciation of “google” could be “googol”. You get the idea.

Keystroke Misspellings

Type your URL (without the www. or .co.uk / .com bit) into the following tool. This will help you create a list of possible URLs from the most common typos. You can never be 100% thorough with this, and frankly probably wouldn’t want to register them all anyway due to cost.

http://www.selfseo.com/domain_typo_generator.php

For “google” it returned us a list of 50 possible misspellings. You can bet Google own them all.

Historic Variations of Your Company Name

Check for all historic versions and variations of your company’s name. For example “WH Smith” is also known as “WH Smiths”, so both urls, www.whsmith.co.uk and www.whsmiths.co.uk (plus other domain extensions) should be checked.

Hyphenated URLs

Take your URL, and place hyphens (dashes) between the words. For example: www.mysiteisgreat.com could also be squatted on at www.my-site-is-great.com.

Abbreviations

Does your company have a common abbreviation? A company like British Home Stores is also known as BHS. Do you have the word “Street” in your name that could be abbreviated to “St”. You get the idea.

Ok, take a breath and then we’ll continue on to how to check that the domains in your list exist, have traffic going to them, or are registered by a third party.

So, our list comprises of hyphenations, typos, misspellings and more. Quite a list isn’t it! Imagine what a domain squatter could do with that list.

Insert your list into the Google keyword tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) in chunks of 20 URLs at a time. Make sure you exclude “www.” from your list, as the tool checks this for you.

If any phrases come up in the results, above “Very Low Search Volume” (by hovering your mouse over the search volume box) then there may be a problem.

What Next?

We will cover what to do when you have found a domain squatter in Domain Squatting Part 2: The Revenge of the Squatted.