What's with "www" and "com" in keywords?

[SystregSystreg is verified member.]

Hi, a couple of questions, what's with the "www" in front of a lot of keywords when I'm searching, you often see something like "wwwsport". Is it a good or bad idea to buy domains with those www letters in them?

At other times, I see a lot of keywords that use "com" in them, such as, "sportcom", now obviously, there is a sport.com domain/site, but would there be a problem if you bought sportcom.com, I mean, it's not the same as sport.com so couldn't be said you were ripping off their name if you made a sports site, right or wrong, just curious, is that allowed?

 

[Rob_F]

Hi, a couple of questions, what's with the "www" in front of a lot of keywords when I'm searching, you often see something like "wwwsport". Is it a good or bad idea to buy domains with those www letters in them?

At other times, I see a lot of keywords that use "com" in them, such as, "sportcom", now obviously, there is a sport.com domain/site, but would there be a problem if you bought sportcom.com, I mean, it's not the same as sport.com so couldn't be said you were ripping off their name if you made a sports site, right or wrong, just curious, is that allowed?

The www prefix is almost always done when people are trying to siphon traffic from the, as in your example sport.com domain.

'com' as a suffix is often used as an abbreviation for company, commerce etc where keyword.com is already gone, it can be a suitable alternative.

Do these/would they conflict with trademark rights? In the www example, imo, almost always, YES – there's no logical reason for you to have www in the front of the domain, other than to siphon traffic. I'd never consider using wwwwhatever.com to develop a site on, especially if a site already exists at whatever.com.

Adding 'com' as a suffix can work sometimes, it would largely depend on what's at keyword.com, how generic/descriptive the keyword is, how famous the site is, etc.

- Rob

 

[SystregSystreg is verified member.]

Hi Rob, cheers for the reply and explanation, in that case, I'll give any wwwsites.com domains a miss then, but sitescom.xxxx look fair game.

One with "com" in it that I came across, like "sitescom" had a million exact searches last month and a million average searches per month for the last 12 months for the keywords, I think it's a very good generic word in front of the com, I might buy the .org.uk version today, post it here and see if I did the right thing, of the other tld's for the domain, only these are left:

.tv
.me.uk
.org.cn
.cc
.us
.ws
.name
.asia

[edit]

I thought to be on the safe side, I had better register it straight away in case someone else picks it up, might be good, might not, just bought this:

playcom.org.uk
Google keywords "play com", 1,000,000 exact searches in October - avg 1,000,000 searches per month for the last 12 months - cpc £0.57.

Google keywords "playcom", 4,400 exact searches in October - avg 4,400 searches per month for the last 12 months - cpc £1.18.