Your brand is your business identity. It represents your modus operandi, your values, your credence and your mission. Naturally, nobody wants to find out that someone is hacking their brand or making unethical gains off their hard work and intellectual property . One of the most common methods of brand hacking is domain name mimicking and traffic bleed.
Using just about any domain name registrar, your brand can be impacted by unscrupulous sorts who most often just want to cash in on trickle-down traffic from potential visitors. Still, this assuredly affects your bottom line.• Take action when and if you see brand siphon; usually, a simple cease and desist letter can work wonders.
Domains that use hyphens or combinations of alphanumeric lettering can be more easily exploited than those that do not simply for the fact that combining letters and numbers in a domain isn’t too hard to replicate within a certain point. The resulting result can be confusion among visitors and mistyping or mislabeling of a brand identity.
• Shorter domain names that are brand-focused and relevant have the highest propensity to rank well over time and sustain those rankings.For instance, websites.com vs. websit.es can create confusion for potential visitors and prospective customers. In some cases, a nefarious actor could try to roll out a traffic grab for the legitimate owner of websites.com simply by inferring they are the authentic owners of the .es extension.
Foreign hosting isn’t advised for any brand protection model because you’ll be forced to operate under the binding laws and regulations of the foreign host nation. This can potentially lead to situations that may arise in the future that could become costly should an IP dispute arise that requires litigation or court actions that overlap across two international borders.