Protecting Your Domain Name

Why Should You Protect Your Domain Name?

Many domain name owners are unaware of how important it is to protect your domain name. What does it mean to protect a domain name? It means several things. First off, you're no doubt aware of the importance of renewing your domain name.

The Importance of Renewing Your Domain Name Every Year

A reliable registrar (the entity that allows you to purchase and secure (a.k.a. register) your domain name) will allow you to not only renew your domain name for several years at a time, but also - to automatically renew it for you. Failing to renew your domain name, depending on the size of your business, could be devastating.

If you fail to protect your domain name via automatic renewal, you will suffer not only in the monetary sense, which applies especially if your domain name is a non-trademarked phrase, but also in the fact that all the work you've done to get your site indexed in the search engines will have to be redone. Not to mention that if your old site stays live the search engines will give you a duplicate content penalty, or simply won't recognize your existing content, since it has already been indexed under your old domain name.

Protecting Your Domain Name: Trademarks

Let's take an example. Let's say our domain name, GuruofSearch.com, is worth $1.5 million (we wish . First, we would need to examine how we arrived at this number. In most cases, a non-trademarked domain name derives its value primarily from visitor traffic. Not only the amount of traffic, but the quality of it. In other words, how targeted the traffic is to your particular industry. If you were to lose a trademarked domain, you could get it back via legislative procedures, given that the domain name is legally yours.

However, if the domain name is unrelated to a trademarked you hold or to your business name, then, if you fail to renew it on time you may lose it for good - along with any monetary value associated with it. Bottom line - an essential component to protecting your domain name is making sure you renew it.

How to Physically Protect Your Domain Name

Now that you've ensured that you won't lose your domain name by forgetting to renew it, we're going to show you how to protect your domain name from thieves and spammers.

Register as Both Registrant and Administrative Contact

When you register a domain name, you're required to provide contact information for your domain. Many people fill this out once and forget about it. Don't make the same mistake! It's vital that you carefully fill out the registrant and administrative contact information in order to protect your domain name. Make sure you use information that applies directly to you, and use an email address and telephone number that you won't be getting rid of. If there's ever a dispute, you'll need to be able to either answer the phone or respond to the email address listed under your domain name in order to regain control of it.

To many people ignore this fact, and years down the road find it difficult to regain access to their domain names. This also comes into play with hosting - if your website moves to a new server, you'll need to update your domain name's nameservers. This can only be done within your domain name's registrar account, which you'll only be able to access if you remember your username and password (something that clients often forget). If you don't have your registrar's username and password, the only way to retrieve them is via the registrant or administrative contact details.

Protect Your WhoIs Data

Every domain name is associated with publicly accessible whois data that shows people who owns a particular domain name. This is a legal requirement, as law enforcement, lawyers, etc. may need to get in touch with the holder of a domain name for legal reasons. However, more often than not it's spammers that abuse the whois databases to get a hold of free contact information on domain owners that they can then use themselves to spam you, or aggregate into marketing lists they can sell for a profit.

Protect Your WhoIs Email Address

The most important element of your whois record (which consists of your domain name's registrant, administrative, and technical contact records) you'll want to protect is your email address. Most registrars will allow you to protect your whois email address by either hiding it completely or turning it into a graphic (as opposed to text) that can't be harvested by spam bots. Make sure you use a registrar that offers a way to protect your whois email addresses.