Can you legally name your domain after the product being sold?

[David]

I read on a forum that it is not advised to name you website domain name after the product you are selling, i mean the "noun" name not the brand name.

For example you want to sell candles, if candles.ie is available, should you not use it?

If you want to sell cups and cups.ie or cups.co.uk is available can you not use one?

Is it not legal/advised to use exact names like that for e-commerce and if so why is this? Thank you 10 points.

[Greg Greenamyer]

Hi Connor,

If you are selling candles it makes perfect sense to have the word candle in your domain name. A good domain name should be descriptive of the websites content.

Google recently changed their algorithm on Exact Match Domain names which freaked a lot of people out. This was done to eliminate crappy sites, not sites with good content. EMD's still work great if you provide quality content.

Greg

[Douglas]

You want your domain name to be as specific as possible, while being easy to remember. I also recommend going doing a domain name search, like godaddy.com to see if the names you are brainstorming are even available. There are a lot of things to consider when choosing a domain name. First you want to buy all of the domain names that surround it. For example, when we created my site http://www.emailexporter.com we also bought .biz, .co.uk, .org, .net, and so on to protect our site from people copying the idea at a similar name. You also want to consider that the average user has a hard time remembering a - or _ in a domain name. So while candles.com is taken, it is harder to remember candles.ie, candles.co.uk, or candle-sales.com. Yet candlesales.com is available.

However you can name your site whatever is available, legally. It could be ilovefuzzybunniesandsillysongs.com while you are actually selling cigars. Now, it wouldn't be a good idea, but it is up to you.

You will also want the domain name to be very close to what it is you are actually doing. If you are talking about or discussing products, like macdiscuss.com. Good luck, it took us a couple days. And remember, young kids can be great for brainstorming.

[Jake]

Sounds like you got some real bad advice, as that is the exact opposite of the truth. For a brand name, legally you would need direct written permission before registering the domain. But the generic name is the best to have. In fact companies may spend millions to get them if they did not get it first. For example Toys R us paid like $14 million for toys.com

So if whatever you need is available get it A.S.A.P. before anyone else does! You can register domains cheap at http://www.newinternetdomains.com

[livewyre]

Definitely SHOULD do exactly what you were advised NOT to do... If you sell candles, it is better to have the domain 'candles.co.uk' (from an SEO point of view) rather than 'waxworks.co.uk' (if waxworks were your company name). This is because you are trying to 'win' traffic from search engines, and your potential visitors probably do not know your name or brand, they know that they want 'candles'... and that is the search term they will use. If you have a more defined niche (to carry on the candle analogy) - if you were selling beeswax candles, then beeswaxcandles.co.uk is probably easier to obtain. In most cases, the simple terms such as candles etc. have already been registered, so you will probably be left looking for a more specific term such as coventrycandles, eastmidlandscandles, handmadecandles - that type of thing - I would say DEFINITELY have the product name (not brand, unless you have exclusive rights) in your domain.
It's not a deal breaker because you can always load your URLs with the product name too, so if you had waxworks.co.uk, you should go for URLs such as waxworks.co.uk/about_our_candles.htm, waxworks.co.uk/handmade_candles.htm etc.. I have done this for a site that had a specific domain name unrelated to the keyword and it works really well as long as you have other words such as your city/town or attribute like 'handmade' or 'custom made' etc. that you can use.
Use the meta tags too and you will probably be well ahead of your opposition..

[Tera]

Was what you read related to Google's Exact Match Domain (EMD) update? Marketers tend to buy keyword rich domain names. Like you said, it makes sense to use terms that people are searching on, right? Google's line of thinking is that a lot of EMD sites are very low quality.

Google’s Matt Cutts (head of the web spam team) announced a new Google algorithm change in September of 2012. He says it will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.

That doesn't mean you can't or should use them, but make sure you have quality content and then you'll be ok. In other words, follow Google's webmaster guidelines.