An exploratory forum thread between acquaintances led to an unexpected conclusion about relying on a .eth to build brand equity. And that is when it comes to search results, .com is treated as the superior tld for a brand. While it’s already widely known that your-name.eth can attempt a workaround by adopting a website url like your-name.eth.limo, that domain name is likely to lose out to your-name.com in search. That could be quite alarming for anyone that’s spending considerable time building up a reputation for realcoolname.eth and telling the world about their decentralized website at realcoolname.eth.limo only to be usurped in search by someone that registers realcoolname.com and puts some similarly related content on it. I mean let’s be honest, Google search still matters even if we’re all in web3.
In the thread, I had originally put forth my ideas about the vast digital real estate that is being afforded to .eth owners by virtue of ens name data being used to populate pages all across the web. With that being the case, I saw a potential opportunity for monetization that I haven’t heard anyone else talk about (maybe because I’m wrong?). In any case, the conversation led me to a test a theory that had been put forth about .com domains that exactly match an established .eth name and how they’ll rank.
I googled both decashed.eth and debanked.eth, for example, and Google returned decashed.com and debanked.com as the first results. That may be a tainted search because both web domains are established, but still. I can’t help but wonder now about the potential for hijacking brand equity in web3 by simply registering the identical name on .com and placing related content on it. Google could award it the top spot on search and the owner of it could monetize searches for the name without it ever technically infringing on the .eth owner’s supposed brand.
Someone also brought up the concept of pairing domains, which means that absent .eth becoming a real working dns tld, anyone building up a brand on a .eth should also register the .com to assert control of the name in search. I need to think about this some more.