What Webmasters Need To Know About Preferred Domain and Their Websites

In the world of search engine optimization, there's a common term known as preferred domain. A preferred domain is simply how you want your web page's domain displayed in search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other search engines.

When people type in your website's address - both with and without "www" in front of the address - the preferred domain can also be defined as the version of your web page's domain that they're directed to.

What's ICANN?

To understand the point that will be made in the remainder of this article, you also need to be familiar with ICANN, the acronym for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

ICANN is registered as a non-profit organization and has been around since 1998.

What's so bad about ICANN and its treatment of unused domain names?

When domain names go out of use for so long, they are often sold by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to registries in wholesale fashion. Such domain names are usually priced ahead of time due to long-standing wholesale agreements between such registries and ICANN.

ICANN profits from this and, rather than opening up unused domain names to the public, they're given directly to private businesses that intend to profit off of these domain names.

It's simply not fair!

Here's a potential solution for this issue

The registries should be forced to sell domain names at low prices, at least this should be true for domain names sourced from ICANN. Although market regulations aren't ideal in the eyes of most people, what ICANN does isn't good for anybody.

What is a registry? How about a registrar?

You need to understand what a registry and a registrar to get what's going on here.

Registries are wholesalers of domain names. Registrars are retail vendors of domain names.

One day, it'll be like this

On down the line, registries will own virtually every single domain name that's gone out of use. They'll be able to charge exorbitant prices for them, which isn't fair - not even to the slightest degree. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/dwig70/preferred_domain_names_are_absolute_bullshit/.