Word to the Wise: Don’t lose your URL. Many people are tempted to purchase a URL (domain name, like www.Jeniffer Thompson.com for example) for five years or more so they don’t have to think about it again. Well guess what—you do want to think about. I can’t tell you how many calls I’ve received from someone whose website went down because they let a URL expire. What’s worse, is that most of those people had no idea where they purchased the URL or how to get it back.

Quick TIP: if you can’t remember where you purchased your URL, you can find out here: http://whois.domaintools.com. This website will tell you who purchased it, when it expires/expired, and most importantly the email associated with that URL.

How does this happen? Well, a Registrar will notify you that a URL is getting ready to expire, but if you no longer use that email address, you’ll never get the notification. Once a URL expires, you have 30 days to get it back, otherwise it becomes available for purchase from anyone. Yikes.

With time, URLs become “seasoned.” This means that they are ranked and indexed by search engines like Google. This takes time and is valuable to your Internet Marketing efforts. If you lose your URL, you’ll have to start all over and that is, well, that’s unnecessarily tragic.

So, don’t think of your URL as something you need to buy and forget, think of it as your anchor, the foundation for all of your work. Without it, things begin to crumble, if not completely crash.

Tags: Business, Domain name, Google, Uniform Resource Locator, Web Design and Development, Web search engine, Website

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 7:00 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Tweet this. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.