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Domains4Good: Redirect your unused domains to social causes
- johnachavez 13y agoFantastic idea.
- sbenario 13y agoMy particular favorite is "unicornfarts.com". :-)
- eugeneross 13y agoThis is such a simple, yet great idea.
- fishtoaster 13y agoIt's a neat idea, but I'd be interested to see at what rate these redirected visitors actually do anything on the sites they land on. I know that if I click a link and find something unrelated to what I was looking for, I general close the tab pretty immediately.
- aziari 13y agoAmy here, one of the creators. Great point, and there will be some self-reporting necessary here since we obviously don't have access to anyone's Google Analytics. If you have submitted domains through the site, please let us know how it's working for you! The referrer should show as domains4good.org. A/B testing the copy/design of the interstitial page before the redirect is also something we can test in the future to see what encourages people to stick around the longest. Thanks for the comments.
- simple10 13y agoAmy et al, very cool. Would be great if this could be used to really boost SEO for the featured nonprofit's keywords over time. Maybe pull some content keywords from the featured site for link juice and then create archived pages for the previous nonprofits. Like /handup -> http://handup.us http://handup.us ???
- aziari 13y agoInteresting idea, and I agree there's a lot more we could do to better support the social causes on-site vs. just the general domain redirects. We created this all in a weekend at the #hack4good hackathon in SF, so what you're seeing now is just the beginning.
- ScottWhigham 13y agoExactly what I was thinking. Anytime I hit a typo domain, it's an accident that's occurred while I was in the middle of a task. Trying to get people to stop what they are trying to accomplish and change direction so drastically seems overly difficult - akin to interruptive adverts on Facebook asking me to sign up for a new bank while I'm commenting on what someone had for lunch. Neat concept but I can't help but wonder whether selling the domain and donating the profits to an actual charity wouldn't be a better use of the "funds". Or just not renewing the domain and donating that $10 to the charity of your choice in perpetuity...
- vonskippy 13y agoLike antibiotic resistance bacteria, if you continue to flood the internet with begging, people will become completely immune to those types of requests (no matter what the cause or how worthy they might be).
- paultannenbaum 13y agoI agree. I used to almost always consider giving at least something to a cause I deemed worthy when I was approached by someone soliciting for donations, but now that I can't walk down market street without being harassed. Now I just tend to just shut everyone out as a result.
- nmridul 13y agoSounds true and I would have expected the same with Television / movie commercials, that people will stop buying those brands. But most of the people go to supermarkets and buy the product that are familiar. This could happen here also. Creating a familiarity. So even if a person is initially irritated, after a month when he / she goes to make a donation, it would be to a charity that is familiar than a completely unknown one.
- chii 13y agoBranding takes quite a bit of work (and may be demographic/psychological profiling of the target audience). At best, randomly redirecting incorrectly typed domains to charitable org's websites just achieve nothing, or at worst, confuse the viewer, and associate "error" with charity. But buying SEO juice with unused domains the same way spammers do is probably a better idea - then a google search is going to turn up the correct sites.
- telephonetemp 13y ago> if you continue to flood the internet with begging, people will become completely immune to those types of requests Is there research to confirm this? It could be that people's willingness to respond to "internet begging" doesn't tend to zero but rather a nonzero constant as they encounter more of it. In that case you'd be better off with more websites that do it.
- dontrebootme 13y agoCounts are simply hits. Not that I tested it or anything.
- RexDixon 13y agoCool idea
- logn 13y agoVery neat idea. Maybe you can convince some of the registrars to make this a choice instead of the standard domain parking pages.
- Skyhoper 13y agoOn it. Have a couple requests about to registrars as well as to Rackspace for hosting. We redirected 6X the number of unique visitors today through unused domains than Facebook generated at launched.
- user24 13y agofyi dreamhost offer free hosting for non-profits
- resistor3672 13y agoSo does Gandi.net
- erenemre 13y agoLoving the leaderboard: ... unicornfarts.com ponypenis.com ... (:
- richforrester 13y agoJust wondering; could this negatively affect your SEO rating?
- mhoad 13y agoI have been in the really high level SEO space for a long time and the second I saw this it made me very uncomfortable for that reason. Theoretically it absolutely could, in reality, it's hard to say but I wouldn't be overly enthused about people pointing random domains at any site I owned. In short, Not to trash the people behind it, it is really well intentioned and I love the concept but reality may pose problems that end up doing more harm than good.
- Skyhoper 13y agoTo the causes, the referring traffic source likes like it's coming from Domains4Good.org. A cause would only seeing referring traffic when it's promoted as the top cause of the day. Links onsite at Domains4Good from cause submissions would also ultimately add to SEO value. Social referring traffic through Domains4Good promotions across all channels, not just redirect, will add value as well.
- rekatz 13y agoCongrats team Domains4good! So proud you gave birth to it at the Geeklist #hack4good 0.2 in Sam Francisco this weekend! ^5 - the Geeklist team
- byuric 13y agoGreat initiative
- xauronx 13y agoYou need a favicon :)
- alastairius 13y agoSeems like a cool idea.
- marpalmin 13y agoA brilliant idea!