Protecting your Domain Name and your Online Reputation

Remember the days when you spent lots of time on your kitchen table planning your online business and mapping Internet strategy? Those good times are probably a flicker in your not so distant past. One of the first things you set out to do on that slow, dial-up Internet connection was to find a domain name and register it with your credentials and contact information. Your investment of a few dollars during the dawn of the Internet is probably worth thousands today, in some cases, worth millions, depending on the domain name you have registered. Here are a few things you should do to aggressively and proactively guard your Internet asset and ensure that it continues to remain in safe custody regardless of the health of the domain registrar company assigned to manage it.

Log into your Domain Account
Most of us have never logged into our domain account ever. In fact, there are many who don’t even know that there is such a beast. If you have never logged into your domain account, ask your web designing company which originally set up your website to send you the domain registrar’s URL, the login and the password. You have a legal right to this information because the domain name belongs to you and you have been honoring the renewal costs over the years.

Lock the Domain and Go Private
Once you are logged into your domain account, you should do the following:

1. Lock your domain. This provides an additional layer of iron clad protection to your domain name.
2. Go private. This means that those who know how to track domain names can’t get to you either by sending you e-mail messages or calling you. This additional expense of a few dollars a year is most definitely well worth the investment
3. Update your contact information with your current address and phone number. This will further validate the authenticity of your claim to name.
4. Activate automatic renewal. Since you are a resident of cyber space for the long haul, set your account on automatic renewal and keep your credit card information active and current at all times. There is an entire industry lurking out there within the folds of cyberdom which pounces on domain names the moment they expire only to sell it back to you at ten times the price. Although this practice, called cyber squatting, is illegal in most countries, we do not believe that you have the time to indulge in unnecessary litigation.
5. Talk to the customer service department at your domain registrar’s company. Call them up and say Hello even if all is quiet on the western front. This will cause their system to generate a log and will further validate your claim to your domain name.

10 year Domain Registration is a Great Idea
If you are considering renewing your domain for ten years - a service just about all domain registrars provide - we want you to know that it is an excellent idea. Even Google will reward you for this decision by placing your website a quarter of a notch higher in its search engine results pages. After all, everything counts in SEO and domain names are certainly no exception.

Conclusion
There are many other things you can do and strategies you can adopt to further protect your online presence. We recommend that you first consider implementing the recommendations outlined above first while we prepare you and ourselves for the next round of recommendations. Do stay tuned!