I purposely typosquat my own “billswartwout.com” and “billswartwoutphotography.com” domain names to retain more website visitors.
First, let’s get this out of the way: I have a love/hate relationship with typosquatting. I love it because it’s a great way to get additional traffic to my website. I hate it because it’s often used by nefarious individuals to scam people. I do not do the “scam stuff” that gives domain squatting a bad name. OK, lets move on…
Our family has been here a very long time. The original Swartwout to come to the “new world” sailed with Henry Hudson and helped establish the trading post at New Amsterdam, today known as Manhattan. Brigadier General Jacobus Swartwout was the highest ranking officer in the Revolutionary Army in the state of New York.
My surname, Swartwout, is a difficult name – to pronounce and to spell. The second “w” is silent but no one knows. Couple that with the full website name(s) and it can easily be confusing.
I want to make sure that when people type in my domain name they are taken to my website. By “typosquatting” my own domain name I can do this. The name SWARTWOUT is often, very often, misspelled SWARTOUT – without the second “w” in place. There is, in fact, a variation of my surname that is correctly spelled that way. There are two more spellings, SWARTHOUT and SWARTWOOD, that are also variations of the “original” SWARTWOUT. But the most common error, by far, is to leave out the second “w” in the name.
Of course there is a town (actually a Hamlet, a VERY small town) of Swartwoutville in the state of New York.
Examples:
Link: BillSwartout.com –> BillSwartwout.com
Link: BillSwartoutPhotography.com –> BillSwartwoutPhotography.com
Interesting! I’m not sure I get the message though? I went to Swartout.com and found it was for sale (for a lot of money!) – I thought you meant that you had taken this URL and forwarded it to your main URL?
I couldn’t get the swartout.com (at a reasonable price) but do have billswartoutphotography.com and billswartout.com – because I “brand” many of my social media images with “BillSwartwoutPhotography.com” and that’s the one that often gets typed incorrectly.