A little while back I had written about State Farm and the domain name SF2Save.com as a domain name used in a TV advertisement. At that time, I clearly thought State Farm® could have used a much better domain name. Fast forward a couple months and it was almost like they read what I wrote in that past article! Last night I saw the same theme commercial for the ad but a much improved domain name used in the ad this time! DiscountDoubleCheck.com

The ad’s theme by State Farm is offering customers a way to "double check" if they are getting the best rate they can get for insurance. The old domain used, SF2Save.com used 301 redirection and forwarded to a special page State Farm set up. The page was StateFarm.com/DiscountDoubleCheck with a tag line of "Save all you can on car insurance with a Discount Double Check™."

Since SF2Save.com forwarded to that page before, it really puzzled me why State Farm used that domain in the ad, because it is very confusing and didn’t really match the message of the ad! The only thing the domain name was similar to was the 1-800 number used.

DiscountDoubleCheck.com IS the right domain name to use in the ad and I am glad to see them using it instead of SF2Save.com, which is a dumpster domain IMO. The new domain name just makes a lot more sense with the commercial, is much easier to remember because the domain does not include an acronym, number, word combination and the domain is much easier to read.

The domain name is still used as a "forward to" statefarm.com/discountdoublecheck but I like the domain better than before.

So is everything "OK" now with the new domain used? No!!!!! State Farm did a classic mistake and they are losing traffic hand over fist currently! The domain name without the www. does not forward to the proper location. This means that the people that type in the domain name into their address bar without including www. end up on a blank page. Those that include the www. do end up on the proper page State Farm intended. This is a very small error but one that carries a huge problem because of all the traffic missed to a dead page!

Even though the domain name uses 301 redirection, the domain name does rank at Google for matching search terms which is interesting and doesn’t happen when 301 redirection is used. I clicked on the listing page via Google and only a blank page loaded, which was a little odd and made me think State Farm is using some kind of little trick to make that happen. Why the page loaded blank is another question.

Digging a little bit more showed me that Google is indexing the domain without www. but the problem is State Farm is not redirecting that domain to the proper page and the reason for the page to be blank. So they did a 301 redirect with the www. and send traffic that way to the proper location but appear to have used the domain without www. to get indexed. At least that is what Google did. Checking a little bit more, Google indexed the site without www. for the search term discount double check but indexed the domain with www. for discountdoublecheck.com . Pretty interesting idea if it was intended, but both pages need to be "working" and not show a blank page with one or the other. IMO, it is always best to build a Micro Site with a marketing type domain like this. This allows ranking in search engines as well helping you get more "real estate" for vital keyword searches on SE’s. Using cross promotion, you can easily link to your main site.

DiscountDoubleCheck.com appears to have been hand registered by State Farm on 8-10-2009 and uses Mark Monitor as the domain name registrar and RackSpace as the hosting provider for this domain.