Linda Goin’s Net

I’ve been ruminating about “dirtypain.com” for the past few days, as I feel that I may have made a mistake with registering that domain name. But, I ran across Ann Smarty’s article on “4 Things To Check Before You Register A Domain Name” this evening, and I used her tips on ‘dirty pain’ to see if they jived with my previous observations. I’m grateful for her observations, as I felt somewhat justified by my decision to purchase that domain now.

In that previous post, I had written that when a story about dirty pain broke on CNN in January, there was one link to the topic - from CNN. One week later, a Google search for the words, “dirty pain” filled the first search result page with relevant results. All total, Google returned 1,290,000 results for both words, but not all those results were relevant. Now, using Smarty’s tips, I discover that perhaps my registration for that domain name may have been a good move. But, more about that in a bit…Here are her four tips, with the first one presenting a two-pronged Google search issue:

Google It First

First, Smarty (known as SEOSmarty), stated that before a person registers a domain, he or she should “search for both [domainname] and [domain name] to see if Google considers it a typo.” In other words, if I type “dirtypain” into the Google search box, it comes back at me with the question, “Did you mean: dirty pain.” In Smarty’s opinion, this Google question is a bad sign, because “a surfer who already knows about you but uses Google to reach you [and you will be surprised to see how many people actually search Google for a domain name instead of going directly to the site] and sees that did-you-mean-x message, you risk losing a valuable visitor who really meant to find you.”

Although Smarty feels that all branding efforts will melt away with this Google question, I think she needs to give the surfer a little credit for some smarts as well. When I type “dirtypain” into Google’s search box and it comes back with that question, it also provides search results. I may look only at the top five or six results or scan the page, but those top search results (at least today) showed only one result that was on topic - the remaining results were a mash of queries requesting definitions for this term. Only when I saw that my query didn’t return relevant results did I want to click the Google lead question to search for “dirty pain” (two words).

Granted, other domain names might suffer from this Google problem, but dirty pain isn’t one of those names at this point.

In the second part of the first tip, Smarty suggests a search for [domain name] (or, in my case, to click on the Google two-word suggestion) “to evaluate how hard that will be for you to manage your brand/reputation. For example, tourwiki.com looks nice if you are planning a nice site on traveling but cannot be branded effectively just because if you search for ‘tour wiki‘, you see en.wikipedia.org [yeah, quite naturally] at the top - can you compete with it? Probably, not.”

She’s right. It would be difficult to compete with Wikipedia. But, when I used the two words rather than one, the search results return a full page of relevant results for this psychological problem. Well, almost a full page…I see a link to “dirty pain ringtones” at the bottom of the page. But, I also see something interesting in the Google return numbers. They’ve decreased from 1,290,000 results for both words in January to 1,240,000 results in March. What happened to those missing 50,000 links to “dirty pain”?

That’s a question I can’t answer at the moment, but, it’s an interesting twist to the dirty pain issue…

Domain Name Associations

Moving on to Smarty’s second point, she stated that it would be a good idea to check current connotations with a domain name. She cites eBay as one place to search for word associations, and Urban Dictionary as another resource. I used Urban Dictionary first, where dirty pain didn’t return one result. I wasn’t surprised, as this term is so new - made popular just two months ago through the media - that it will take a few months, maybe years, for it to hit Urban Dictionary. eBay was a dry well, too - zilch, nada, nothing on a search for dirty pain at that site.

So, outside dirty pain’s recent definition as a psychological problem, the term doesn’t have a history. The term is fairly fresh.

It May Take Two to Tango

Lastly, in Smarty’s fourth point, she stated, “make sure both plural and singular forms” of the domain name are available and to register them both. The reasoning behind this plan of action is simple - you don’t want your brand to fall into the hands of a competitor who realized that most people might use the plural version of a given domain name in their searches. Now, this might work with something like “walking fanatics” vs. one “walking fanatic,” but it doesn’t work with a domain name like dirty pain. One dirty pain is enough - two dirty pains might mean that you have a split personality, or that you and your twin rolled around in the mud together. I think I can ignore this last point for this domain name.

Back to the Numbers

Back in January I also ran a Google search on “dirty pain” with the quotation marks. I didn’t report the results, as they number less than 100. When I ran it again tonight, I found a 2,030 return on the quoted search. Quotes around a search term will generate a majority of results that should be relevant to the term - in this case, the psychological ramifications with dirty pain. And, the numbers now show that more people are writing online about dirty pain as a psychological problem - all spinning off that first CNN article and the coverage that Oprah Winfrey gave to the topic in January.

Unfortunately, Ann Smarty doesn’t broach the quotation trick, as this fifth tip could show some numbers that are unexpected and worth some consideration on the branding level (not to mention the cha-ching possibilities). But, her tips are well taken and worth remembering as they’re simple steps that anyone can take to check out domain name possibilities before registering that name.

Since “dirty pain” is so fresh, the best thing I can do at this juncture is to sit on the domain name until writers provide enough material to cite from for a Web site. In the meantime - at least in my mind - that domain name is gathering steam. If the numbers climb for absolute relevance over the next few months, so will the domain name value. A tangible Web presence will add even more value.

After all, you can’t spin a domain name - or a brand for that matter - out of thin air. Or, can you?