contentious.com

Those of you who use the internet to prominently feature yourself or your organization, listen up: Don’t ever, EVER let the domain names you actively use expire – even if they were used only for a specific time-limited project. It’s worth an annual financial pittance to hold on to those domains virtually in perpetuity.

Some prominent politicians such as Marilyn Musgrave (the conservative Republican Congressional Representative from Colorado who sponsored the controversial Federal Marriage Amendment, and who is currently seeking re-election) recently learned this lesson the hard way. Their expired domains from previous election campaigns were grabbed and reused by online pornographers. (See this Boulder Daily Camera story)

I kid you not. See Musgrave2002.com. The site’s current content doesn’t exactly jibe with Musgrave’s preferred public image. You’ve been forewarned.

Such domain takeovers are usually not malicious. Online pornographers, sleazy marketers, and other creators of “para-sites” thrive on grabbing domains that already attract traffic – whether residual or accidental. This has even happened to me.

The truly embarassing part of the para-site problem is how inexpensive and easy it is to prevent this sort of after-the-fact online abuse…

Maintaining a domain name is dirt cheap. For example, GoDaddy only charges a one-time fee of $7.95 to transfer registration plus $8.95/year renewal fee. My preferred domain registry, SimpleURL, charges as little as $10.66/year if you renew a domain for three years at a time.

Weigh those costs against how stupid a serious professional, candidate, or organization would look if their past site – which probably attracts residual traffic due to existing inbound links – turns into a porn site or maybe even worse?

Other ways to deter para-sites involve how you select your domain in the first place:

• Choose a domain that you’ll keep reusing. For instance, instead of getting a new domain for each campaign, why didn’t Marilyn Musgrave’s people just register a domain they could keep reusing – like VoteMusgrave.com? (Heh heh heh, too late, I just bought it. That domain now points to this article – so far…)
• Choose domains that are easy to spell. That lessens the risk of people encountering a para-site by mispelling your domain.
• Create subdomains for specific project or campaign sites. A subdomain is a shortcut to a specific directory within a web site (which can be a discrete sub-site or just a section of the main site). It’s a character string (usually a word) that appears before the domain name, separated by a dot. For instance, blog.contentious.com is a subdomain of my domain contentious.com. (James Hering recently mentioned this strategy from a marketing perspective in ClickZ. Other good subdomain examples from Dan Tobias.) This is cheaper than registering separate domains, it may be easier for visitors to remember, and it’s completely under your control.
• Invest in buying several versions of your domain. At least grab the three most common suffixes (.com, .org, .net) of your domain, and perhaps also .gov and .edu if relevant. It’s also smart to grab the most common misspellings of your domain. Point them all to your main site so you don’t waste that traffic. Yes, owning all these versions can add up to a chunk of change over time, but depending on how much of your reputation is at stake with your online presences, it might be worth the cost. Just ask Marilyn Musgrave about that.

* NOTE: Another definition for the online slang term “para-site” is a site that frames another site’s content, generally without permission from the content creator or copyright holder. (Per WhatIs.com)