I do affiliate marketing, and whenever I can catch a domain that is the same as the merchants, I try to catch the www- For example, if I'm an affiliate with adultfriendfinder.com - because I want to appear as the merchant on google adwords, I buy a domain that is www-adultfriendfinder.com - (www.www-adultfriendfinder.com -don't click that!) My question is, is it still possible to rank high on search results if my domain is www-? Or, does google some how know that's "naughty" and they knock points for having that type of domain name. Can you please explain your reasoning, and if possible, show me a website that has top 10 in google search with a www- domain? Thanks!
You might be able to (though I doubt it), but I'd be more worried about the lawyers representing the companies that you're piggybacking the domain name off of than the search engines for trademark infringement than anything else.
yea..agreed with Dan Schulz..You can still be the authority if you are using a domain which is totally different from your targeted keyword. What's the most important thing is the quality and huge sums of backlinks.
I rather innocently came up with a domain name that had a trademark name for another company in that product area. One day my hostgator account was locked up. I had made the domain private since it was free. So the company traced the domain back to the host. They threatened hostgator and I was assumed guilty and had my hosting account locked up. By this time the domain had proven dead to me and I could care less about it. But it took almost a full day of dialogue with hostgator to get them to open my account so I could delete the domain from being hosted before they put my other 100 or so domains back online. So I agree with Dan. I later searched copyrights and sure enough the phrase/words were owned. I do not think it is worth messing with someone else's name. I think at the very least the affiliate will close your account and not pay you. At least that is my story and my new found view {
as Dan says, you are more than likely to run into legal issues. do some research on UDRP (uniform domain name dispute resolution policy) and you will figure out thats not a smart business practice. you will get off easy if trademark holders come after you with UDRP complaint. depending on the severity, you might even face a civil suit which is not pleasant