Back in 2011, I reported that Microsoft bought a series of 49 domain names on one day–but what was most interesting to me was that they bought 8 SEO domain names, primarily Bing SEO domain names. These were mainly to protect their brand, I suspect. Here’s a list of the SEO-related domain names that they bought that day:
searchengineoptimizationforbing.info
searchengineoptimizationforbing.net
searchengineoptimizationforbing.org
seoforbing.info
seoforbing.org
bingsearchengineoptimization.info
bingsearchengineoptimization.org
bingseo.info
Missing from that list, though, was SEOforBing.com. They had bought the .INFO and the .ORG domain name, but apparently couldn’t purchase the .com (which I suspect happened), or they didn’t try to force the owner to surrender it to them. Nonetheless, the SEOforBing.com domain name is currently available for registration as of the writing of this post. Perhaps Mark Monitor, the service Microsoft uses to protect their brand, should pick up that domain name since it’s available. Apparently they think seoforbing.info and seoforbing.org are worth keeping, as they’ve held onto those domains since 2011.
There are other versions of these Bing SEO domains available currently, as bingseo.info is owned by Microsoft, but bingseo.com is not, for example.
At one point, seoforbing.com redirected to a 404 error page on Google, according to the Internet Archive. That’s why I do think that Microsoft or Mark Monitor should pick up those domain names. It doesn’t look like Microsoft or Mark Monitor owned seoforbing.com, as it did redirect to Google.
Microsoft currently owns the .com, .net, .org, or .info of these:
searchengineoptimizationforbing
seoforbing
bingsearchengineoptimization
bingseo
I checked NameCheap.com and these are currently available:
searchengineoptimizationforbing.com
seoforbing.com
bingsearchengineoptimization.net
bingseo.org
And for those of you reading this post and thinking, “gee, what a great opportunity to pick up a Bing SEO domain”, I don’t recommend it–you may be hearing from Microsoft’s lawyers.