Chiropractic Domain Acquisitions

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

Planet Chiropractic added two chiropractic related domains yesterday, to a list of acquisitions made over the course of the past few months. The first was a chiropractic website for chiropractor Brandon Takahashi of Takahashi Chiropractic in West Los Angeles. I had built a chiropractic website for him back in 2001, which featured information for his then Malibu office and chiropractic office in West LA. Like I’ve seen lots of other chiropractors do, Dr. Takahashi didn’t renew his domain, and it was deleted from the registry as a result.

This is something I see chiropractors do far too often, and I admit I’ve had some domains I’ve lost on my own, because I’ve forgotten where the information was, or I registered the domain using my old chiropractic office address in downtown Los Angeles. Don’t let this happen to you, keep your domain information in one place (that goes for me as well) and if you only have a handful of domains, consider registering them for 5 to 10 years in advance. That way you greatly decrease the odds that it’s going to expire.

What some people don’t realize is that when a domain expires, the website hosted basically disappears. It may still be available via an IP address FTP account, but it won’t be viewable on the World Wide Web. I found a copy of Dr. Takahashi’s site archived online, and apparently someone else had as well.

After the domain had expired another individual picked up the domain (you have probably seen this many times) and put different information on it. We recently contacted the individual and convinced them to transfer the domain to Planet Chiropractic, since it was us who had created the original website template (it had been re-uploaded and was back in use, along with our copyright information).

Keep an eye on your domain ownership – that’s the lesson here.

The other case is a domain that was very similar to chiropracticblogs.com (which forwards here). The domain was collecting some of the content being created and posted on planet chiropractic news. My concern was that the domain and the content it was displaying may be creating duplicate content issues that could have been creating negatively affecting search engine rankings for our content. I’ve dealt with scrapers before, in all sorts of different ways, but this one turned out to be quite easy.

The domain was owned by a non-chiropractor who was a self-proclaimed fan of chiropractic care. They weren’t running any advertising on the site, but they were pulling quite a bit of content from our site (without written permission), and reproducing it as their own. After a few phone calls and some discussion we convinced the domain owner to shut the site down and give us access so we could initiate a 301 redirect. That makes for a much better user experience and less confusion for those seeking information related to Planet Chiropractic on the Web.

Lesson here was that a few phone calls and being polite can often times payoff in resolving simple misunderstandings. Moving forward!