Why You Must Manage Your Digital Waste: A Cautionary Tale

Why You Must Manage Your Digital Waste

A cautionary tale: a colleague decided to pursue another business so she let her 5 year-old domain expire. Some “private” entity bought her domain and at some point before she let it go – copied her old files and put them back up. So now, even though she is no longer in business, her old clients still get the impression she is – and she has no control over what these people to do her files, her logo etc. Her recourse is to report it to Google and send the “private” entity a cease and desist letter –but the odds are not in her favor of a quick or easy fix.  Frighteningly, web sites are very easy to steal.

Despite the fact that (in my opinion) search engine optimization is a somewhat fading part of internet marketing*, it, and pay-per-click ads, have made lapsed domains worth their weight in gold.  Here’s why:

• Search engine optimization guides state that search engines give greater weight to older domains in order to weed out spammers, duplicate sites, and link farms (things people do to try to trick the engines in to ranking their sites higher). So older domains are an opportunity to put up bogus sites just for the purpose of adding links to optimized websites.
• Some people are making a lot of money buying old domains and selling Google Adwords on those sites – money for nothing (for them).

So, if you are taking down a site and want to protect your reputation, try to hold on to the domain for several years. Also consider buying frequent misspellings of your company name/domain and additional extensions. It’s tough now with the plethora of domain extensions available but if you get a decent amount of traffic, you have the resources, and you care about your online reputation, think about .us, .net, .co, and a few others at a minimum.

One other tip, you may have seen the recent New York Times Magazine article about digital litter – the files we leave behind when we die. The article mentions the ramifications and highlights ways you can plan for this. Your business faces the same issue. For example, the same colleague also noticed that despite her business closing, Google Places still listed it. The take-away is that if your business or name reputation matters, cleaning up your digital waste is an onerous, but necessary, consideration.

*New search websites dedicated to weeding out sites that use SEO tricks, the emphasis on Google Places, and the ever evolving search engine algorithms will likely make many current SEO practices obsolete.