Comments on: ICANN Non-Latin Domain Names and SEO Implications

By: abe

abe — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:36:00 +0000

You made some very important points. I would like to further discuss this with you. Please contact me.

By: EuropeanDomainCentre

EuropeanDomainCentre — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:23:27 +0000

As Bill mentions .РФ will most likely be introduced in Russia, but across different Arabic speaking countries there are rumours that .emarat (translated) will be launched. In India there will be one top level domain for each of the 11 languages and so on. These local initiatives will make it harder to protect your brand everywhere but local people will be able to use their local language instead of adapting to the existing Latin characters, and that´s a great thing

By: Bill Winans

Bill Winans — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:11:13 +0000

ICANN is definately opening the floodgates, but the “homeruns” for online presence and branding will be for companies to register (or buy from existing domain holder) the idn.com and/or various cctlds like idn.jp, idn.cn, idn.de etc. In time, these will all alias to idn.idn. A nice article you wrote…forward thinking companies will move quickly to get their international presence established with IDNs.

By: Jeff MacGurn

Jeff MacGurn — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:05:29 +0000

Thanks for your comments, you both make some valid points. Perhaps I was too specific in my initial post. I’m trying to highlight the general trend of ICANN increasing the possibilities for domain names – and the associated opportunities and challenges for our brand advertisers.

We see this move as ICANN opening up the proverbial floodgates and with the approval of non-Latin domains and the availability of .anything domains, there is a definite trend toward more diversity and availability of domain names.

With this trend we want our clients to be prepared by knowing the brand and non-brand terms that are most important to them so when new domains become available, we’re not stuck trying to figure out what to register.

By: Bill Winans

Bill Winans — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:31:59 +0000

On point number 3 regarding developing lists in various languages, it should be noted that all of the “top” generic idn.com, idn.net, idn.cn, ind .jp etc etc were long ago registered starting back as far as the 2000′ and 2001′. Up until now, all of these International Domain Names have had the “latin” letters behind the dot (.jp. .cn, com etc). The announcement by ICANN was permitting the extensions “after the dot to be used in international scripts”. So the various idn.cn, idn.jp will “alias” to Chinese: .中国 (.cn), Japanese: .日本 ( .jp). The same is proposed for idn.com, idn.net etc. but the timetable has not been announced.

Although IDNs have been around since 2000′, they have never come into mainstream use due to the lack of browser support (IE-7 was the first to fully support IDNs) and that browser was about a year behind the US getting into the Asian market. Even today, still far too many people around the world have non-IDN compliant browsers, but with the publicity that should change over the next year.

The only significant “new” domain name that will be available for registration as a result of the ICANN announcement will be the idn.rf (idn.РФ ) for Russian Federation which are reportedly only available to Russian nationals. Most other “top” generic names, cities and geos have long been registered so there won’t be that opportunity for the top gtlds and cctlds as your article infers.

By: Brian Strevens

Brian Strevens — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:31:24 +0000

recently there has been a lot of buzz about IDNs etc and there are a lot of people that don’t really know anything about them. IDNs have worked and have been available to register since at least 2001. So yea, you missed the boat but hey I’m selling if you run across my whois rant over i wish you luck with IDNs.