Having the right web address means everything when running a website. A URL-that string of characters following the http://-should be easy to remember, or at least easy to guess at. In the world of higher ed, prospects, students, alumni, and other online visitors simply want to type in a school name, follow it with a .edu, and splash onto a desired homepage.
Imagine the frustration when a URL that seems to belong to a college or university really leads to some other website that serves up all sorts of unrelated banner ads or annoying popups. Unfortunately, more web users are having this experience, thanks to malevolent forces who want to reroute web traffic and garner bogus attention (and sometimes advertising dollars) at the expense of a college or university.
They are called cybersquatters, and they are exposing IHEs to the darker side of the World Wide Web, warns Morgan Davis, web director at Warren Wilson College (N.C.), who has had first-hand experience in dealing with cybersquatting.
Cybersquatters may have another motive, too. They sometimes want to annoy a CIO just enough to provoke the outright purchase of the registered domain name that is close to the original registrant's. Of course, the cybersquatter typically demands far more money than the modest few dollars it can cost to register an original domain name. Sometimes, though, the payment is worth it to clean up the mess.
Davis explains that Warren Wilson dealt with a cybersquatter last year.
"When someone searches on Google, we want him to find something that really comes from us." -Morgan Davis, Warren Wilson College
"It turned out that the college's name was showing up on some websites that were purporting to be blogs," he explains. The URL listed for the college in these blogs was www.warrenwilson.com, which is very close to the college's registered domain, www.warren-wilson.edu. Those who clicked in the links in these blogs were rerouted to a website that served up advertising sold by a cybersquatter based in Nevada, he adds.
The instance is not unusual in higher ed, according to Davis. While most web managers and CIOs know enough to register a .edu domain name, they will fail to register related domain names that can point to the .edu website. As a result of his experience, he advises registering as many permutations on a name as are reasonable. Purchasing domain names that end in .com, .org, .net, and .biz is a good start.
"These fake blogs were most insidious because they were showing up in Google searches," Davis says, recalling the frustration. He has no metrics to prove that the cybersquatter hurt interest in Warren Wilson, but he did fear that the rerouted traffic could hurt the college's reputation.
"When someone searches on Google, we want him to find something that really comes from us," Davis says. "We are trying to clean out these folks who are masquerading."
Two years ago, according to EDUCAUSE, another incident affected approximately 1,000 colleges and universities. A Minnesota-based company, BDC Capital, Inc., acquired a reported 23,000 URLs that included some type of reference to names of colleges and universities. BDC specifically held the names of many websites that referenced higher ed sports divisions.
For example, the cybersquater purchased www.UniversityofNotreDameFightingIrish.com, which is not at all related to the University of Notre Dame's (Ind.) official athletic site. (That URL is http://und.cstv.com.) Currently, the false .com URL still points to a website that includes comments about Notre Dame sports, but which says in fine print at the bottom of its homepage that it is not affiliated with any college or university.
Another URL, www.Universityof MichiganWolverines.com, which was purchased by BDC, now points to nowhere. Marvin Krislov, vice president and general counsel at the University of Michigan, claimed at the time that the domain name was causing confusion with visitors who really wanted to see the official U Mich websites, www.umich.edu and www
