Uncover Cybersquatters

Usually I look at business theory and practice, but today is one of those excursions into the completely pragmatic. As your company gets better known, it may become the target of cybersquatters. These are people who try to capture traffic that would otherwise go to your company's site. Their intent might be to see if they can make online ad revenue from the diverted audience, to twist your arm into buying the rights to the domain, or even to pull a scam.

Ideally you should have registered other variations of your domain, such as .net, .org, .biz, and so on. To see if you're covered your bases, go to the Internic Whois server, which lets you look for different domain names, and check variations on your domain name.

Next, see if there are any typosquatters - people who try to anticipate how people might misspell a domain name or type in a good, but wrong, guess as to what it might be. BCI Law Group has a free tool that will do various searches.If you're doing work on a corporate website, this can be a valuable extra value service you can toss in to help build good will and alert the client to potential problems.