Peter's Blog

Location! Location! Location! . . . . for a Domain Name?

Being a Realtor® you already know that location is everything! If you read one of my previous blogs, you know that Domain Names are becoming the Real Estate of the 21st Century. So if this is true, how do you factor in location?

Does the Internet even have anything to do with location? Well, a website can reside in any computer anywhere in the world as long as it is connected to the Internet. Because of this, geographic location (a location that can be found on a map) is not necessarily important, but a virtual location (that can be found by your browser or a search engine) is very important.

The .com DNS (Domain Name Server) stores all domain names which end in .com (every single domain name must be unique). So if you were in the business of selling cars, you might have domain names such as chrysler.com, mercedes.com or toyota.com. What if you sold many different cars or cannot register one of those domains because they were registered by their respective auto manufacturers. You could register a generic name like cars.com. That would be a great name, right? Yes, except we're all a little too late in registering this domain name. Because this is such a great, common and generic name, it would be easy for search engines to find it and people to remember it, so it has great value. In other words, cars.com is prime real estate on the Internet.

The .com suffix of domain names is equivelent to New York City real estate. Our example of cars.com, is like Park Avenue. There are other suffixes to consider such as .org, .biz, .net, .tv, but these would be considered more like class "B" or class "C" properties. If you recently tried to register a .com domain name, chances are it was either not available or the price was really high. Did you know that diamond.com recently sold for $7.5 mil dollars? Location! Location! Location! . . . of the Internet.

So the next time you hear that domain names are like real estate of the 21st century, you'll know why. If you'd like to read more, do a google search or read this nice article on Realtor.org by Michael Russer.