“One thing is true and that is the more TLDs you register and have content behind them, the more potential you have for showing up in one or more places on that first page of Google search results.”

Interview by Mike Sullivan

Lance Wolak is the Vice President of Marketing at .org, Public Interest Registry. He is responsible for the global marketing strategy and functions including brand, public relations, channel development, and product management.

MO:
Can you talk a little bit about the Public Interest Registry and .org?

Lance:
I’m the Vice President of Marketing here at Public Interest Registry. Public Interest Registry, actually more specifically dot org, celebrated its 25th anniversary recently just recently. Public Interest Registry has been managing the dot org domain since 2003. As you know, the use of domain names has evolved quite a bit in 25 years. It started primarily with organizations and companies registering a name for their online presence, and it’s evolved into just about any use for information that goes online has a domain name associated with it now. It’s come a long way. Dot org has grown with that as well in all that time. It became the place where dot com was for commercial organizations and org became the home for non-commercial type of organizations. If you were an individual, a group, a club, not a specific commercial entity, then org was the place you went to, to register your domain name. Today we have lots of companies that are registering a dot org either for brand protection on their name or for highlighting some of their do-good initiatives.

MO:
How does Google treat .org names compared to .com, .net or other TLDs?

Lance:
There is always the question of if I register a dot com or I register a dot org, am I going to see different results? One thing is true and that is the more TLDs you register and have content behind them, the more potential you have for showing up in one or more multiple places on that first page of Google search results. I think organizations are now looking at not just registering other versions of the name at top-level domains for brand protection but also putting content behind them. If you were to search on that company name or that product category for example, you may see more of the search results on that first page reflecting that organization’s name. So I think there’s a trend of that going on right now. But overall, with regard to org versus com or net, there isn’t any specific advantage between those. One other thing to consider too, and some organizations are doing this, is if some of your do-good initiatives as a corporation may reside on your dot com site but may be buried many levels deep in your website directory, a search engine will only go so deep when they index your site. If all your do-good initiatives are buried several layers down, then they may not get picked up by a search engine. That’s an opportunity for a corporation to put it on a dot org to highlight their do-good initiatives and actually have that indexed by a search engine and become more visible to the public.

MO:
Last year, there was a press release with the intent to “raise brand awareness of the .org domain . . .”

Lance:
We’ve been studying the many uses of dot org domain names for some time. We’ve done a lot of work to understand what our base is made up of in terms of the activities that go on a dot org site. There are some really interesting things going on. We really felt that the Why I Chose was a place for us to share all this information that we were finding. While it may look like a re-branding kind of effort, to us it was really, “Okay, jeez, we should let people know what we’re finding out here and share this with the rest of the world.” There’s a wide variety of uses for org. It’s primarily for serving the public interest, but it ranges from companies individually with the dot org presence and on the Why I Chose site there was a group of companies that got together to launch a site that talked about how well they’re doing. This was during a peanut recall and how they were doing good things to protect their customers and so forth. As I said, there’s just so many interesting ways this is being used that we just thought gosh we need to get this story out.

MO:
What are some of the uses you have seen for the dot org domain today?

Lance:
We can start simple. If you go to Google.com, of course, you get the search engine. But if you go to Google.org, you get to see what they’re doing with the community and some of their various community initiatives. You have non-profits of course that are using dot org as their primary site, but again typically the things you know and expect to see on a dot org, things like what non-profits are doing, every company or individual seems to have that interest in mind as well and many of those will go ahead and launch a website. You could have an individual, such as yourself or I, that we may feel very strongly about a specific cause, may have had a relative that went through a battle with cancer so we’ve decided to put up our own website to help fundraising for the American Cancer Society or our involvement with the various walk for the cure kind of programs that are going on. It’s really the power of communication and reaching out to your community for a cause that has driven a lot of people to register a dot org website. Again, this includes companies that want to reach out to their community, individuals or a group of people pulling together to reach out. There are a lot of stories about individuals that are launching sites. Even in the age of social networks, you have people still wanting to put up a permanent home where they can use all the tools available for composing very engaging interaction with their community well beyond what you’d get with a LinkedIn or a Facebook kind of experience. That’s really driving registrations and the ongoing development of websites.

MO:
What is your opinion of .co and some of the other TLDs?

Lance:
There’s a lot of attention right now within the ICANN community. You’re familiar with ICANN, the organization? Okay. There’s a lot of attention there on new top-level domains. ICANN has done a very good job of working with the greater community to build up an applicant guidebook that will create an environment of new top-level domains where caution is put in place for security and safety on the Internet, stability, doing a very thorough job of that. We’re seeing dot co re-launching as a generic, and I think that has a potential of getting some traction, because when you think about habits today, people type in dot org or dot com. Dot co is just one letter short of typing com. So the habits of typing of the C, the O, you stop there. It doesn’t really break a habit that people have that they really may not be paying close attention to as they’re typing in a name. I think they’ve got that going for them. There’s always the question of name availability and would you register a name that’s now available in dot co but is already taken by someone else on dot com and risk losing that traffic? That’s always a concern by somebody that’s investing a lot of money in their web presence. It will be interesting to see how all of that plays out over time.

One thing that I found that some organizations are proposing is when they launch their new top-level domain, they will also do some type of a certification at the same time. If you register a domain name in a community TLD, doing so also projects to the world that you’re part of this community, you’re registered in this community, maybe you’ve passed some certification that allows you to register that domain name for that community. That’s a nice add-on to an organization that may already have a dot org domain name or a dot com and they now want to be seen as a green organization or part of a different type of community. I think there’s potential for a new top-level domain to get some traction. I would hate to see another kind of me-too top-level domain that’s really not any different than what you can do today but to add something on top of a domain name registration. Dot music is doing some very interesting things. Dot tel is doing some interesting things that are a little bit different than a typical use of a domain name that has a way of pulling in people to register and make use of the technology that sits behind that domain.