Never Use YourDomain.com in Your Instructions
By Robert Plank

Sooner or later you are going to have to instruct someone how to set something up on your web site. When you do don't make this common but simple mistake.

You might be writing some sort of how-to article, providing setup instructions for a script or even giving away details on how someone can put their free e-book on their site so it propagates virally.

The best thing to do is use "example.com" as the sample domain name.

A common mistake I see all over the Internet is the tendency to say something like "YourDomain.com" in place of the person's actual domain name. On Google, as of 2005...

"yourhost.com" yields 36,700 matches.
"yoursite.com" yields 156,000 matches.
"yourname.com" yields 245,000 matches.
"yourdomain.com" yields 423,000 matches.

Two of these sites are web hosts, and the other two are those nonsense spammy "portals" that take up space on the Internet. If a user blindly copies and pastes a sample link of yours, they could end up on a competing site -- bad news for you especially if you're a web host yourself.

I write how-to articles myself. For a while I tried substitutes like "your.host", "your.site", but things like that just don't work as an example -- people all over the place are saying the average attention span on the Internet is something like 7-10 seconds.

If someone is Googling for info and stumbles on your article on a site somewhere, a lot of them are going to jump straight to whatever example you have, copy and paste it, and leave. I know even I do this sometimes.

The domain example.com is reserved, and can never be registered by anyone. Use "example.com" as your example. When writing a tutorial you don't have to worry about that mention of a site someday becoming a link to that site.



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