Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, government webmasters would buy up every domain name extension available for their websites. It was reasoned that this would avoid Cybersquatting and would ensure that people typing in your URL would find your site no matter what extension they put in.
Flash forward to 2010. Search engines rule the web. SEO is no longer a reference to the Spanish Ornithological Society. Very few people actually type in a URL anymore. In fact, some of the top web usability consultants such as Jakob Nielsen are even predicting the demise of the URL altogether.
And yet, government departments are still shelling out thousands of dollars per year to register every domain name and extension possible. This is done routinely and I am guessing, without much thought. It is a vertigial reflex from the Web`s pre-historic era.
So, I thought it would be good to reopen the debate (if debate there ever was).
Is there still a valid justification for government organizations to register multiple “just-in-case” URLs and alternate domain name extensions (.org, .net, .biz, etc) or are we just wasting hard earned taxpayer money?
I think it is worth it. The cost of it isn’t much but at the same time the damage if one of those names was a inappropriate site or a misinformation site would be massive.
For instance I own the domains that could be associated with my name… just in case I ever decide to do something worth while and need a website.
I’m not sure it’s really needed for Government. I think many people assume the majority of official government websites are at .gov. Also, there’s so many various extensions these days that weren’t even around previously – that’s quite a lot to consider – .tv, .mobi, .name, . jobs, .info, .us, .us.com, and on and on ……..
Not sure what you are driving at with “SEO is no longer a reference to the Spanish Ornithological Society“