Should We Worry About a New Form of Typosquatting?

Jul 7, 2008 - 8:31 am 1 by

It's becoming easier to start registering domains with typos -- but not the kind you'd expect with a little extra letter here and there. It starts out with a discovery from pageoneresults:

With the approval of IDNs recently and now the testing phase, I do believe we as Internet Marketers and Webmasters are going to be faced with a new level of search sabotage and phishing that makes the current methods look like amateur stuff.

By using special characters in the URL, which is becoming increasingly possible now, one is able to register domain names never thought to exist, such as www.pàypal.com (note the accent over the a).

It seems that a number of people are looking to monetize on these domain names. They're putting them up for sale and hoping that the rightful domain name owners claim them.

While it's still relatively new and we're not sure how long this will last, one thing is certain that it's time to start educating website owners about the potential dangers of this version of typosquatting.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

 

Popular Categories

The Pulse of the search community

Search Video Recaps

 
Video Details More Videos Subscribe to Videos

Most Recent Articles

Search Forum Recap

Daily Search Forum Recap: August 29, 2025

Aug 29, 2025 - 10:00 am
Search Video Recaps

Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Spam Update, AI Mode Changes, ChatGPT Does Use Google, Search Ad News & More

Aug 29, 2025 - 8:01 am
Google Updates

Google August 2025 Spam Update Impact Felt Quickly

Aug 29, 2025 - 7:51 am
Bing SEO

Bing Webmaster Tools Sitemaps Index Coverage Button Missing For Some

Aug 29, 2025 - 7:41 am
Google

Google Tests Rounded Search Results Snippet Design Again

Aug 29, 2025 - 7:31 am
Google Maps

Google NMX Business Profiles May Show New Profiles Button

Aug 29, 2025 - 7:21 am
 
Previous Story: Documenting Your SEO Changes Historically