.co Cybersquatting Showcase - Who Will Get Sued First?

[Theo]

There is no doubt some idiots will register .co domains as pure attempts to monetize traffic of domains that bear strong marks, e.g. check out Papajohns.co

However, despite .CO being a ccTLD it has an air of global approval due to its proximity to .com and its prior use as a second level domain in other ccTLDs such as .co.uk - in many cultures "co" stands for corporation.

This is not as if Russia invited everyone to use .ru because the corporation that oversees the .co Registry is a joint Colombian/US company.
Personally, I mostly invested in geodomains that will rank well once developed.

 

[Seraphim]

Personally, I mostly invested in geodomains that will rank well once developed.

Major keyword, same spelling Spanish / English geos should do ok [assuming your major developing is outside of the ccTLD umbrella], and would have no applicability or visitor confusion issues if bolted to a Spanish - Colombian centric language section [which obviously means some minor flipping potential for the raw domain itself]. Though with so many .com/.net/.org opportunities opening up lately due to global economic conditions, I personally see no need to speculate in .co myself [cheaper registration fees, more flexible applicability for a non-Spanish speaker such as myself].

 

[A D]

I mostly invested in geodomains that will rank well once developed.

I grabbed generics that could not be confused as tm typos.

-=DCG=-

 

[Theo]

Major keyword same spelling Spanish / English geos should do ok, and would have no applicability or visitor confusion issues if bolted to a Spanish - Colombian centric language section [which obviously means some minor flipping potential]. Though with so many .com/.net/.org opportunities opening up lately due to global economic conditions, I personally see no need to speculate in .co myself.

Google has already announced that it will not be treating .CO as a local TLD, in other words, it won't skew search results to favor .FR if you're searching from France. This is a unique opportunity to literally treat .CO as .COM and simply register & develop keywords that will rank well. It's not as if you took a .PL trying to make it #1 in Google in the US.

 

[Seraphim]

Google has already announced that it will not be treating .CO as a local TLD, in other words, it won't skew search results to favor .FR if you're searching from France. This is a unique opportunity to literally treat .CO as .COM and simply register & develop keywords that will rank well. It's not as if you took a .PL trying to make it #1 in Google in the US.

Google's geo targeting behavior has become so difficult to pin down at this stage [maybe it's just broken], that I'm not even sure anymore if they would handicap an English driven .pl within their Google.com index [which is contrary to what I used to think]. I'm seeing some weird rankings these days [within the last 12 months]. Obviously that doesn't mean visitors aren't becoming increasingly confused as to where the hell they are anymore. Which again, for me personally, means a $8 .net is more viable than a $30 .co [assuming some domain based ranking barriers are liberalizing]. Will be interesting to see how the Google issue unfolds.

If you develop and rank a major keyword .co within the Google.com index, publish a brief article about it over at DomainGang, and I'll be sure and have a read. Would be an interesting experiment to take a look at, since I generally take everything Google says with a huge grain of salt. By the way, was it Matt Cutts <<< that confirmed this? Do you have the source article link, I can't seem to find it in blog land?

 

[Theo]

The keywords I registered didn't exist since the mid 90's in .com so I am pretty confident about what I can do with them, simply because the .com domains are all parked, the same for the .net and .org - even .info and .us.

 

[Seraphim]

The keywords I registered didn't exist since the mid 90's in .com so I am pretty confident about what I can do with them, simply because the .com domains are all parked, the same for the .net and .org - even .info and .us.

I've got a goofy half finished purely English driven geo .pl floating around out in Google [a SEO experiment], and it seems to pull down Google.com index traffic with ease lately [and 0 Google.pl traffic]. Can't tell if some domain based ranking barriers have liberalized recently, or if it's an age rank factor issue [the domain is a couple years old now]. If I ever get the free time I should play with it some more, as I'm increasingly interested in possible oddball ccTLD English keyword ranking exploits [assuming they do exist].