Important Lesson from $2.45 Million Investing.com Purchase

Heather Huhman Dec 12, 2012 Tweet

Entrepreneurs know that having a solid domain name can make or break their startup’s success. If your URL isn’t short, easy to remember, and relevant, it can have a big impact on traffic and company branding.

That’s why many businesses dole out big bucks to get their hands on the right URL. In 2011, social enterprise software company Salesforce purchased social.com for an impressive $2.6 million. This year, the largest purchases were those of dudu.com and personalloans.com, each of which sold for $1 million.

But a new purchase just announced by Forexpros.com marks one of the biggest domain sales in history. The company just bought the domain name Investing.com for $2.45 million, making it one of the top 30 URL sales ever.

Investing.com will act as a global financial portal for novice and semi-professional investors and traders – perfect for the entrepreneurial crowd. It will feature quotes, charts, breaking financial news, tools, analyses, and more. The site seeks to differentiate itself from competitors Reuters and Bloomberg by offering all content and tools completely free to its global customer base.

“Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for active financial traders and investors worldwide by providing streaming real-time data, powerful analysis tools, and the most user-friendly and language-accessible site of its kind,” says CEO and founder Dror Efrat.

Forexpros.com was already one of the top 40 financial websites in the world. Launched in 2007, it has garnered 3.6 million users per month. Now, Investing.com has 70 employees and offices around the world, including in Madrid and Tel Aviv, and will be available in 18 languages.

Only time will tell if the financial site sees continued growth, but the purchase of a sleek new URL comes with an important lesson for entrepreneurs to remember: always use 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirection of your content, meaning all qualities – traffic value, PageRank, etc. – will be passed on to the new URL. Google’s index will remove the old content and replace it with the new content.