Typosquatting: Are your domains at risk?

If you have a Web presence or domain names registered around a business or product name, by now you have likely heard about ‘cybersquatting’ – the act of registering a domain name that is similar to an existing trademark, company or brand. Cybersquatters typically attempt to sell these domain names – at inflated prices – to the company or individual invested in protecting the brand and reputation associated with the original name.
Typosquatting is a similarly underhanded, but clever, spin-off of cybersquatting. Typosquatting capitalizes on … you guessed it, typographical errors and spelling mistakes – the occasions when you mistype a domain name and get a website you didn’t bargain for. Typosquatters commonly register multiple common mistypes of popular domain names.
Typosquatting can occur in any of the following scenarios. Using www.webnames.ca as our example, a typosquatter may register a common typo (www.webmanes.ca), a variation of a domain name, (www.web-names.ca), or other misspelling that approximates a known URL. Typosquatted domain names may be pitched-for-profit to the owner of the original namesake (in this case,Webnames.ca), or other interested party.
What about your domain name?
While all businesses risk losing important variations of their primary domain names by neglecting to register them, it is typically high-traffic, high profile companies or organizations that are targeted. Potential damage mounts when misdirected traffic arrives at a website with inflammatory or provocative content; on occasion, typosquatters have also been known to spoof legitimate websites by mimicking their appearance and logos.
Once upon a time the Web was a friendlier place. Back in 1998 you could enter www.yaho.com and be forwarded to a site called www.typo.net, which billed itself as “the first World Wide Web URL spell checker” (click here to see the archived site at www.archive.org). Typo.net would then forward you along to Yahoo. Things have changed.
This summer the U.S. based National Arbitration Forum awarded Google the rights over several domain names – googkle.com, ghoogle.com and gooigle.com – that capitalized on typographical errors around the Web giant’s name. In the highly publicized case, the typosquatted domains sent would-be Google users to websites harbouring malicious trojans and spyware downloads. The National Arbitration Forum ruled the Russian owner had no legitimate rights to the doppelganger domains registered after the launch of Google and was using them in bad faith.
Do you need to be concerned?
In short answer, probably not. If you are a small or medium sized business, it’s unlikely someone will piggyback your domain name to generate hits. However, there are lessons to be learned. First, if any of your business domain names are prone to being misspelled or mistyped, register them and capture the traffic you are losing. It’s simply good customer relations to anticipate and forward these domain names to your business website.
More on the Google typosquatting dispute:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/…google_ruling/
http://www.wired.com/…68150,00.html