

Domains4Good: Redirect your unused domains to social causes - Skyhoper
http://domains4good.org

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fishtoaster
It'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.

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aziari
Amy 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.

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simple10
Amy 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) ???

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aziari
Interesting 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.

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vonskippy
Like 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).

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nmridul
Sounds 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.

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chii
Branding 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.

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erenemre
Loving the leaderboard:

... unicornfarts.com ponypenis.com ...

(:

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rekatz
Congrats team Domains4good! So proud you gave birth to it at the Geeklist
#hack4good 0.2 in Sam Francisco this weekend! ^5 - the Geeklist team

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logn
Very neat idea. Maybe you can convince some of the registrars to make this a
choice instead of the standard domain parking pages.

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Skyhoper
On 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.

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user24
fyi dreamhost offer free hosting for non-profits

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resistor3672
So does Gandi.net

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eugeneross
This is such a simple, yet great idea.

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johnachavez
Fantastic idea.

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richforrester
Just wondering; could this negatively affect your SEO rating?

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mhoad
I 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.

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Skyhoper
To 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.

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dontrebootme
Counts are simply hits.

Not that I tested it or anything.

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sbenario
My particular favorite is "unicornfarts.com". :-)

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alastairius
Seems like a cool idea.

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xauronx
You need a favicon :)

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marpalmin
A brilliant idea!

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byuric
Great initiative

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RexDixon
Cool idea

