IDN Domain Acquisition

There are still major opportunities to purchase IDN domain names at great value in all the popular IDN languages, here’s why you might want to:

IDN SEO  – Exact Keyword Match IDN Domain Names

Whereas exact keyword match domain names have previously been limited to English-language keywords, the field is now opened up to search term domains in local languages worldwide.

This is a huge change. Webmasters for non-English language sites can now leverage exact keyword match domains to boost search engine positions. So why have international webmasters have been slow on the uptake?

  1. Lack of clear knowledge about the existence of IDN domain names.
  2. Uncertainty over IDN.com vs IDN.IDN.
  3. Lack of browser compatibility.
  4. No previous culture of leveraging exact keyword match domains in SEO work.

So this adds up to one huge opportunity to the savvy website developer. There are a couple of great acquisition / development combo plays out there:

  1. Language Play – Purchase great keyword domains across a variety of sectors in one language, and focus on building out sites in that market, seeking out local advertising networks to maximize eCPM, or
  2. Niche Play – Focus on one niche, be it “music”, “games”, “downloads” or whatever, and acquiring powerful exact keyword match domains for that niche across the popular IDN languages. Then build one core SE-friendly site platform that can be easily localized to your different language domains.

What do you end up with? A basket of sites, whether language or niche based, that have potential to go top ten in Google for major international search terms. And if you don’t believe an exact keyword match domain name can really help you get top ten, take a look at this case study.

IDN GEO – Potentially More Valuable Than ASCII GEO Domains Even

GEO domains have been a big hit in the ASCII world, both for development and investment purposes. And they could be still a bigger play in the IDN world for the simple reason that GEO domains are very often “reserved” in the local ccTLD.

So, for instance, “tokyo”.jp (東京.jp) cannot be registered, nor can other Japanese cities. This only adds to the value of “tokyo”.com (東京.com) and “tokyo”.net (東京.net) as it means anyone wishing to launch a “Tokyo” portal using an exact keyword match IDN domain will have less domains to choose from when trying to purchase one in the resale market.

And its not just Japan. Many other countries have huge “reserve lists” of words they don’t want being registered in their sovereign ccTLD. And many of these reserved domains are geos.

IDN Single-Letters

ASCII single-letter domains are just not available. Apart from a few that were registered and put into use “back in the day”, the rest are reserved by ICANN and will one day be auctioned off for many millions of dollars each.

But for IDN domains, its a whole different story. Due to the way IDN domains are puny-encoded into ASCII domains for DNS purposes, even single-letter IDNs are actually a minimum of 5 characters (example: Thai single letter domain ด.com is encoded as the ASCII domain xn--l3c.com) which means they have all been registered and are available for resale.

So if you fancy investing in single-letter domains, the IDN shop is the only shop open for business!

How We Can Help

If you are interested in purchasing IDN domains in the resale market, then please consider using our consultancy and research service as we can help you shortlist the languages, sectors and ultimately domains that will meet your exact requirements. We maintain relationships with many of the big IDN portfolio holders so can also help you when its time to “go after” the names.