Hmm first covered Topix.net in November 2005 (pictured above) and here’s how they look today, a year and four months later:

Tomorrow? They will likely be emphasizing topix.com. Let me disclaim before getting too far that this blog has been treated very well by Topix.net. Their algorithm has an almost uncanny ability to pick out what is news and what is not from this blog, something that often changes from post to post. I’m impressed.

But I’ve never been impressed with their .net domain name.

Something mentioned here repeatedly — especially when reviewing other sites and services — is the importance of business sites owning their .com. This is a drum I’ll keep beating until the vast majority of domains purchased are no longer dot coms (likely never). You can take all the .us, .tv and so on, they are worth a tiny fraction of the value of the .com. Sure there are exceptions like the absurdly difficult to type de.licio.us, but the advertising has been out there for 10+ years and people think dot com by default. Places like the podcast/videoblog company podtech.net are leaking traffic to type-ins and only helping to freely promote their .com counterpart.

Topix.net is another site that launched without owning the .com. They must have realized the error of their ways and paid $1,000,000 for topix.com, Rafat Ali reports:

About 50 percent of visits to Topix come through a search engine, and about 90 percent out of that is through Google…Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10 percent, that would essentially be a 10 percent loss in ad revenue, CEO Rick Skrenta said in the story. Topix will run its site at both Topix.net and Topix.com for awhile, in order to get over any unpredictabilities in Google and other search results.

There’s a serious, important business financial lesson to be learned here. If/when you have the choice to choose a business/product/service name, get the .com domain first. Even if you aren’t opening for business for a year or more, you need the domain early on. Get a blog setup and write about the process of launching your business.

Choosing the right domain name
If you are an already established business offline starting develop a presence online you might have to come up with a creative take. Just remember some simple guidelines for choosing good business domain names below. Some of these don’t apply to non-business sites and depending on how you classify this blog (personally I don’t classify Hmm as a “business” site), you’ll note we’ve violated several of them.

1. Keep the size of the domain as short as possible, preferably under 10 characters and using one or two words
2. Watch for domains using combinations of words that spell something very different than intended (therapistfinder.com anyone?)
3. Tread carefully with gimmicky domains like Flickr without the ‘e’ — you know people are going to flicker.com which is one of those domain parking for $$ pages.
4. Avoid using words in domains that can be shortened like “you” (MakeYouGoHmm is a bad example: we’ve had to purchase numerous domain variations because of mistypes). Worse is: ‘for’, ‘4′, and ‘four.’
5. Keep words in normal order for example on yesterday’s Hmmcast I mentioned bandboston.com as possibly the worst domain name for a rock band that sold millions of albums. Bostonband.com would be better, but that was already taken.
6. Be careful with names that can be easily pluralized by mistake (a few mainstream publications have wrongly linked to this site as makesyougohmm, hence we bought that one and redirected too)
7. Using more than one hyphen in the domain looks like spam (bad example: this-is-my-domain.com), it is preferable to use words without hyphen like makeyougohmm instead of make-you-go-hmm. We do have an established domain that uses a hyphen and don’t own the non-hypenated domain which I wouldn’t do again if I could start over. We’re sending type-ins the other way, but it’s not the same amount of bleed as not owning the dot com. Consider it a tradeoff for a really good name if you can get the-name.com as opposed to thename.com. Also it pays to see how good the non-hyphenated name is as you might have/build a much better site with the hyphen.

I’m sure there are plenty more suggestions other webmasters could recommend. Please use the comment or trackback area below to add to the list.

So my domain name sucks, now what?
If you don’t have the money to buy the .com for your domain and stuck with a dot com domain that could be improved, you still have options.

Time is perhaps the biggest enemy, so buy a better one and work at building the new name ASAP.

The longer your site is establishes itself with a lousy domain name, the more time consuming and difficult it will be to migrate to a new domain. Will there be search engine listing problems? In the short term probably yes, but what’s more important long term? Making it easy for both new and experienced site visitors to find you without being bookmarked, or being a hard to remember and type domain name?

Eventually your existing domain can become a redirect and the search engines will learn. The content is what drives pages over time more than the domain name. Of course there are other factors like a tedious directory structure that/looks/like/this.html.

At the end of last year we switched our group blog project from a third party free hosted blog service to our own domain and server. Our group had spent nearly a year adding content to the blog elsewhere. It took Google less than a week to adjust their engine to point to our own new domain and other sites continue to build up the new domain.

Best of luck with your domains both new and existing being easy to remember and type.

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