Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Domain Names’ Category

If you hadn’t heard, domain name purchase and renewal prices for .com and .net are going up  by 7% and 10%, respectively.

The announcement came to me from a GoDaddy email. The change was brought about by Verisign; so, expect all registrars to up their prices.

What can you do right now? If you haven’t already done so, renew all of your domains immediately to take advantage of renewals while they’re still at their current prices. Come July 1, 2010, you’ll be paying higher fees, like it or not.

This is really not that big of a deal unless you own a lot of names and then it makes sense to renew them before July 1.

Over the years hundreds of stories of domain name theft have been reported, most famous among them of course is the theft of Sex.com.  Even as recent as last week, reports of stolen domains sent a chilling reminder through the domain industry as valuable domains Before.com, Adios.com and others were stolen from Warren Weitzman. Until recently, there hasn’t been a case of a domain theft where the thief was caught and arrested. However, on July 30th, Daniel Goncalves was arrested at his home in Union, New Jersey and charged in a landmark case, the first criminal arrest for domain name theft in the United States.

In a similar fashion to the Sex.com theft, the events that led to Goncalves arrest involve a long back story, one that spans well over 2 years, and many players.  Although insiders familiar with this case contend that Goncalves has stolen other valuable domains, this case centers on the theft and subsequent sale of the domain name P2P.com.

The Victims
In 2005, internet entrepreneur and domain name investor Marc Ostrofsky and attorney Albert Angel along with his wife Lesli Angel partnered to purchase the domain name P2P.com for $160,000 from a Wisconsin company, Port to Print Inc. The domain industry was heating up in 2005, as was the emerging peer to peer music business and the co-owners of the domain name saw a great deal of potential with this investment and future development of the domain.

Ostrofsky is a well known investor in the domain space. His name was etched in domain name history with his 1999 sale of Business.com for $7.5 million and the multi-million dollar domain holding company,IREIT, that he helped form with investment backing from Howard Schulz and Ross Perot. Albert Angel is an attorney and former Justice Department prosecutor with a background in internet payment processing. Angel and Ostrofsky have known each other for over 25 years and have done business together in other ventures.

The Angels had already invested in a small portfolio of domain names including profreedom.com and drugoverdose.com (2 more domains reportedly stolen by Goncalves). As a nurse who dealt with teen drug abuse issues, Lesli Angel became interested in buying and building sites on domains in the late 90’s. Domains such as drugoverdose.com gave her a means to reach out to some of the same audience that she was already helping as a nurse.  As the domain space heated up, Angel continued buying domains and built up a portfolio of around 800 domain names.

Read the full story at Domain Name News

When you get your website setup, make sure that the domain name is registered to you and that your the administrative contact on the domain name record.  This is what always will happen if you, the lawyer, buy the name yourself and set it up.

Yet many times, the client will have the web designer buy the name and just take care of everything involved with setting up the website.

The problem can be if you have a falling out with the web designer or whoever is managing your site.  Then if you want to move the site to another web host, you might have problems because you won’t control the domain name.

The reason the domain name is so important, is because of the fact that if you want to change your web host and move your site somewhere else, you have to change the DNS settings at the domain name control panel.   

If you can do this, then you can simply change over to another host. If you don’t have this information, then you have to depend on whoever setup your site.

A worse problem would be if you didnt actually own the domain name.  Sometimes companies will setup the domain name in the companies name and not the clients name and so technically you wouldn’t even own the name if you were not listed as the registered owner.

For all of my legal clients, I will setup a separate domain name account in the clients name and use their billing information so everything  is in the clients name.   This is how it should be done, so make sure that you own your domain name and have control to make changes if needed.   

You can create a basic blog using most blogging services like Typepad or Blogger but your then stuck with a generic domain name.

If you want to use a customized domain name like www.legalsearchmarketing.com, you must first setup some advanced settings in the blogging software and then also with your web hosting or domain accounts. Here are the steps needed at Typepad to setup a customized domain name with your registar.

1)  Setup your blog with Typepad and then goto the control panel, choose "site access" and then "domain mapping". Then you need to run through the wizard to setup the domain.

2)  Setup your domain name with your registar like Godaddy.com and make sure the domain name is parked.

3)  At Godaddy.com, choose Total DNS Control and create a CNAME record and enter the information from the Godaddy wizard in step #1.

4)  Then once the CNAME record is setup, go back to the typepad blog and the domain mapping section and set the domaim name as "active".

That’s it, now instead of having a long domain name with the typepad.com address, you can have a geographic specific keyword rich domain name like Chicago Estate Planning Law.

Not all registars will allow you to make advanced DNS changes and sometimes you might have a domain name that is already setup with a web hosting account, in that case you can usually make the same kind of edits with your web host.

I recently had a law firm client whose law firm changed names. This presented a problem with the domain name because it had to change to reflect the new firms name. This can be a problem in the search engines if the original name has been in the index for the past few years.

If you just change names and stop using the old one, either the old name will continue to come up or if you just delete the name and stop using it, then it will eventually just disappear and you will lose all your search engine rankings.

THE SOLUTION IS USING A 301 REDIRECT

The solution I used for this law firm was to use a 301 redirect which involves editing the .htaccess file so that it redirected anyone who found the old domain to the new domain name.   Its important to make the right updates to this file so that even if the user finds a subpage of your old site, they will be redirected to that same page on the new domain name. 

This has worked out well and after a couple of weeks, the new name is now in the Google index and the old name is gone. It takes a little longer at Yahoo and MSN but at least the users are being redirected to the correct domain name.

Go Daddy.com Encourages Longer Domain Name Registrations

I noticed today when I was registering a domain name at Godaddy.com, that they encouraged me to register for multiple years (see below), citing a portion of the recent Google patent application.  They are correct in that longer registrations would more likely indicate that its a legitimate web site, but it will take more then a multi year registration to get good organic search engine rankings!

Yet it does makes sense to register your domain names for multiple years, especially if you plan on keeping the web site and especially now that Google has made a reference to it. I would suggest a length of at least 5 years.

FROM GO DADDY:

As part of Google’s recent patent application, Google made apparent its efforts to wipe out search engine spam, stating:

Domains registered for longer periods give the indication, true or not, that their owner is legitimate. Google uses a domain’s length of registration when indexing and ranking a Web site for inclusion in their organic search results.

The best place to get a domain name for your legal practice is at GoDaddy.com. They are the cheapest at $8.95 per year versus $30 plus per year at other registars, yet I find they have the best customer service and also make it easier to manage the domain name.

They also have a "private registration" feature for $8.85 per year that makes your listing private and keeps your information away from the spammers. They also make it easy to transfer your domain name from another register. I can’t recommend any of the other services they try to sell you once you buy your domain name but they are the best overall for buying and managing your domain name.

If your firm needs any assistance with your domain name needs, please visit our domain name services page.

Post from legal blog watch about registering the new upcoming .eu domain names.

Bill Heinze at I/P Updates points to this great piece by Richard Schreier at Pool.com that offers a checklist for registering domain names once the new European Registry for Internet Domains makes the .eu internet Top Level Domain (TLD) available. 

For all you trademark lawyers, this one is a must-read.