Domain Name Stupidity of the Week by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, April 18, 2009 A couple of weeks ago Toys’R’Us paid $5.1 million to buy the Toys.com domain name. This should have been a great deal for them with their shiny new domain ranking fourth for the “toys” keyword, providing an estimated 25-40,000 click-throughs every day. The only problem is, it appears that Toys’R’Us doesn’t employ anyone who actually knows about SEO. Within 10 days of the purchase, the Google ranking had gone. What happened is that they simply redirected the entire domain to the Toys’R’Us home page. Toys.com no longer had its own site so Google delisted it. They’ll get some type-in traffic still, but all that business coming from a fourth-place ranking for a keyword like “toys”? Gone. Even crazier, Toys’R’Us have gone to the trouble of registering the typo domain ToyRUs.com (missing the first letter ‘s’) but nobody bothered to forward it to ToysRUS.com. These guys seriously need some help. Filed under: Revenue About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.