Buying Multiple Domains for Your Education Related Website

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Many institutions and educational organizations are launching new websites these days. Many are not .edu websites, surprisingly. If you look at search engine records, this may be supported by the fact that many student prospects are not as aware of the .edu extension as we are in the education field. So one issue that tends to come up when talking with clients in this situation is whether or not they should purchase multiple domains. The best practice in most industries, not just education, is to buy common misspellings and alternative names that a customer might use for your website. Mispellings are pretty self-explanatory and the most common ones should be pretty easy to determine. As an example of an alternative name, you may be launching a website for a specific intiative, lets call it "Educators for Penguins" and you have the domain name penguinsrock.org. Some students may type in the brand of the initiative (educatorsforpenguins.org) rather than the domain you used, so you'll want to purchase both, even though you only plan to use one for the actual website.

For organizations that aren’t using the .com extension as their main address, it is particularly important to purchase the most common extensions as well. This prevents debacles such as the notorious whitehouse.com scandal, where a pornography site set up their website and became the most common destination for children researching the White House (which is whitehouse.gov). Or, what they call “traffic funneling” where seedy characters try to funnel away your traffic using similar domains or variant extensions of the same domain. Unless you just completely lack a budget at all, the cost to purchase the additional domains is nominal and you can usually find a good deal on one of the bulk domain sites for at least the first year. Once you have purchased the domains, you will need to set up what is called a 301 redirect for those domains to your primary domain, which just means that if someone types in the alternative domain, they will be forwarded to your main domain.