Surprise Traffic To A Domain Name From An Unlikely Source

2 Dec 2009

Recently we acquired a medium sized town / city .COM on drop, I think it slipped through since some people call the city one thing yet the official name is another. I chose to pick the name up because after doing some research (one of my employees used to live in an adjoining area) I determined the official city site plus other governmental sites all used the name of the city plus the word city in their domain names. As luck would have it though they developed the .ORG which makes sense for them.

Now, as you know I make my living from developing alternative extensions and have not had any issues doing so but the occurrence I found today was actually quite interesting, forget all the discussions about traffic leaking to the .COM if you develop something other than a .COM. That is something that will be a discussion for the years to come and really cannot be argued, the only thing that can be argued is how much.

But how about links being pointed to the wrong place, link leakage. Now, as I say that there is no way for me to know if that is what happened here but from what I can tell no major development happened on this domain name. I had it parked for a few months but never really checked where the traffic was coming from (yes it gets type in traffic) but recently I put a small development on it, to be honest it was just a place holder site until we got ready for the next step but when I went to check if there were any terms ranking yet I noticed something. Several hits from the local police station website.

What happened? Well I went to the site and found the link is pointing to the .COM , I have no idea if the intention was to point it to the .ORG or not. But what I did find looking through Archive.org is that the site was registered back close to 2000 but was really just a link site with a few links to local businesses, looks like a local had it but then let it go and a domainer picked it up on drop along the way.

So it is possible that the link was meant to be to the .COM but I am thinking I am possibly getting link leakage rather than type in leakage this time around.