How to prevent your lawn care website domain from being stolen.
Can you imagine starting up your lawn care business, picking a domain name, and setting up a website only to have it stolen right from underneath your nose? You wouldn’t think it could happen. Especially after all the time you spent in making your website and all the money you spent promoting it. But this happens every day to an unlucky business owner. Let’s check out this discussion from the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum and see what you can do to prevent it from happening to you.
One lawn care business owner wrote “a local company I know of had their web domain stolen. Some guy was able to buy their domain because they had hadn’t paid to re-register it in time. When the company found out about it, they called the new owner immediately.
Words were exchanged and they threatened to sue the new owner but wound up paying him a couple of thousand dollars to release the name. It is extortion but it’s happening right now as we speak! What can be done to prevent this from happening?”
A second lawn care business owner said “your best protection is to buy your domain for multiple years or just sign up for auto renew on a credit card or bank account that you will always have.
In SEO terms, it is never a good idea to buy a domain for only one year. Google views that as a ‘lack of authority.’ The reason is that many black hat re-direct sites and link farm sites are only bought for one year.
There are several steps to protecting yourself.
1) Register your domain for multiple years. Once your registration date is within 365 days of expiring, register it for another year. This means your domain is always greater than 1 year from expiring.
An additional benefit of this is that a tiny part of the search engines’ algorithms look for the expiration date. They reward (albeit only a small amount) domains which have an expiration date further away than 1 year.
2) Keep your registration information up-to-date. This includes your physical mailing address, email address, and phone number.
3) Lock your domain with your registrar.
4) Set ‘auto renew’ to yes. Don’t completely rely on this since billing procedures (or your credit card’s expiration date) may have changed since last time your registered.
While you are registering your website domain you may also want to registering some additional names that are variations of your original domain and include your keywords.
Let’s say you live in Orlando FL, and you own www.BobsLawnCare.com
You buy www.LawnCareOrlandoFlorida.com
You buy www.Lawn-Care-Orlando-Florida.com
You buy www.LawnCareOrlandoFlorida.net
You buy www.Lawn-Care-Orland-Florida.net
You buy www.BobsLawnCareOrlandoFlorida.com
etc, etc, etc.
By doing this, you block the competition from having a shot at your keywords. And improve your chances of being found when someone looks for lawn care in your area.”
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