Domain Names: The £10 Mistake That Can Destroy Your Business

[00:03]

Darren Jamieson: On today’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, I want to talk about domain names, but not one of those boring podcasts about domain names and types of domains you can use, or top-level domain extensions and all that. No, I want to talk about a terrible mistake you can make with your domain names—one that I’ve made myself. So I’m not casting aspersions here because I have done this myself, and it can be extremely costly.

This mistake is if you think you’re never going to need a domain name again, and decide, ‘I’m not going to use this website; I don’t need it; I’ll let it expire.’ You have to be 100% certain that you’re never going to use that domain again. If you let it expire, it’s gone—and it is extremely unlikely you’ll ever get it back.

Let me throw myself under the bus first of all and explain what happened to me when I made this mistake. We had a domain name related to Engage Web, because we’d bought up a lot of domains related to the name ‘Engage Web’ to protect the brand so other people couldn’t use it. One of those domain names was ‘engagewebdesign.co.’ We thought someone might take that, so we got it and figured we might use it for a landing page. In the end, we didn’t do anything with it.

We had lots of domains with ‘Engage Web’ in the name, and each was costing us, I don’t know, £10-15 a year. We thought, ‘Let’s let a few of them go; we’re paying for these.’ And we let a few go. It was probably about a year later that someone set up a business called ‘Engage Web Design.’ Our company is called ‘Engage Web.’ That’s not cool. They were in the UK—that’s really not cool.

The worst part is that we knew them. We had taken a client from them a few years earlier, so they knew us as well. They set up ‘engagewebdesign.co’ and thought everything was fine. Luckily, we’d protected the trademark for ‘Engage Web’ so other people couldn’t use it in relation to web design and digital marketing in the UK.

So, we had to protect that trademark legally, going through our IP lawyer, which ended up costing us well over £1,000. The other side argued, ‘Oh, we’ve never heard of Engage Web,’ and we said, ‘Yes, you have; you know who we are. “Engage Web Design” is our brand!’ Eventually, they relinquished the domain so we could get it back. But that domain that we didn’t renew for the sake of about £10 ended up costing us about £1,000.

Most businesses, most people wouldn’t be able to get that domain back. We were only able to because we’d trademarked ‘Engage Web.’ Without that, it would have been almost impossible.

[03:13]

Darren Jamieson: I’ve seen this over and over again. The reason it happens is that if you have a domain name and a website up for any period of time—a year, two years, maybe even ten years—it has value. Even if it doesn’t get traffic or generate leads, it has value as an existing website and as a historic domain. Anyone can take your domain, put whatever they want on it, and Google knows it’s been around for a while.

If they take your domain and put something on it with links to another site they want to rank higher, it’s going to improve that site’s ranking. I’ve seen domains that have lapsed and then been used for spam or, in one case, a Russian import site selling knock-off trainers in the UK. Not cool. Not cool. But that’s because they didn’t renew their domain. I’ve seen others end up with porn on them—why wouldn’t they? Once you let it go, it’s gone.

[05:26]

Darren Jamieson: There was a famous story, one I’ve shared in workshops, about Heinz. They ran a competition on one of their ketchup bottles with a QR code linking to a website where customers could enter. They didn’t renew that domain because they didn’t think they needed it anymore. Someone else got it and put a porn site on it, which meant there were QR codes on Heinz bottles in shops linking to porn. If you just renew the domain, it costs pennies in the grand scheme of things. But when it goes wrong, the PR disaster can be huge.

Years ago, when I worked in Cardiff, a client had two directors who had an acrimonious split, and one disappeared—the one with access to all the domains. He didn’t renew the domain, and it lapsed, and someone else registered it. They had to start from scratch with the website because they couldn’t get it back.

[06:25]

Darren Jamieson: Now, here’s why this podcast is so important. If you’ve got a domain name you’ve been using and you no longer use it—do you use the email for it? Because if someone registers that domain, they’ve got access to all of your email. All they have to do is set up a catch-all email address, and suddenly, every email going to you at that domain will pop into their inbox. And if you used that email to log into a social media platform, they can reset the password. They’ve got you.

This actually happened to one of our clients last week. They let go of an old domain but were using the email for social media. They lost access to their social media account—all because they didn’t renew the domain.

Perhaps the most high-profile example of this was with the company I used to work for, Game. Back in the early 2000s, when I designed the website, it wasn’t ‘game.co.uk’ because someone else had registered that.

[08:24]

Darren Jamieson: Game had bought a platform called Barry’s World, which ran game servers. Barry’s World had a lot of different servers with a lot of different domains controlling those servers, and one of them was accidentally not renewed. Someone just didn’t renew it, thinking they’d do it next week or whenever, but it needed to be done before it was due. That server went down, and luckily, they were able to renew it because no one sniped it, but the server was down for days.

[09:49]

Darren Jamieson: So, here’s the key takeaway from all this, and please, make sure this is the one that sticks. If there is any likelihood, any possibility at all, that you’re going to want to use a domain again—if you use email with it, if there’s any potential future use—even a 0.1% chance, keep the domain. Don’t let it go.

Once a domain name is expired, it’s extremely unlikely you’ll ever get it back. Someone will register it, do whatever they want with it, and you won’t be able to stop them. If you have email tied to that domain, they will take all of your emails going forward, and you’ll have no way to prevent it. So please, do not let domains go if you think you’ll ever want to use them.

[10:43]

Darren Jamieson: I’ve been Darren; this has been The Engaging Marketeer. If you found this useful, leave me a review, leave me a rating, and give me your domain names—I’ll take all domain names; that’s absolutely fine. And I’ll catch you on the next podcast.