At the recent TRAFFIC conference the generic domain Cowboys.com was sold to a representative of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team for $257,000. Amazingly the sale was then canceled on the basis that the buyer believed the winning price to be $275.

There’s a lot of coverage of this incident across the domain world but here are my 5 reasons why the Dallas Cowboys made a big mistake.

1. They Lost Out on an Investment

Domains certainly aren’t going down in value. They missed the chance to make an investment in a generic domain that was directly useful for their business in the meantime. The figures speak for themselves, they had a chance to buy at $275k and a few days ago it sold for $370k.

2. It Would Have Secured and Expanded Their Branding

There’s a lot of confusion about trademarks and generic domains. I’m not a lawyer but this seems to be the way it works. If you buy Cowboys.com you can’t infringe on an existing trademark, so that means setting up anything that relates to the Dallas Cowboys or the NFL is out of the question. The word ‘cowboys’ is a generic term though, so running an unrelated business on it is fine.

This seems to be exactly what the current buyers are doing, as Eric Rice has stated, “we have been studying the thriving country and western market for over 6 months and are glad to finally have the domain needed to proceed in the category”.

However people have a strong brand association between ‘cowboys’ and the ‘Dallas Cowboys’. ‘Cowboys’ is a brand which they have a stake in. Now they have lost the opportunity to take further ownership in that term. Another company can quite legitimately make a play for the ‘cowboys’ brand space and there is always a possibility they will end up owning it in the eyes of the public.

The Dallas Cowboys could have secured that term in the search engines, a clever bit of defensive domain registration.

3) They Will Loose the No.1 Spot for Cowboys

At the moment typing in “Cowboys” to Google or the other engines does give you the Dallascowboys.com site at No.1. However Cowboys.com is only a few places from the top at 4th position. As all SEOs know, it’s easy work to get a domain ranking for a keyword term when that matches the domain name. Cowboys.com is a small site that hasn’t done much in the way of marketing to date. Although Google’s backlink tool is broken, you can still see the trend. The command shows that Cowboys.com has 18 links against 1,230 links for the DallasCowboys site. Yep, a keyword rich relevant domain is a powerful advantage when it comes to ranking.

With very little link building work, Cowboys.com is going to take first place away from the DallasCowboys for that term. I imagine this round of publicity and links has given cowboys.com a good start to that campaign.

4) They Never Counted the PPC Value

If the Dallas Cowboys carry out a Pay per Click campaign, it’s fairly certain that they will use the keyword ‘cowboys’ in there. As I wrote before, it’s a term which is strongly associated with their brand. PPC costs on that term run at $460 - $820 per day. As with domain prices, PPC prices are also steadily moving upwards. They had a chance to secure the No.1 organic spot for that term, permanently.

5) They Will Loose the SiteLinks

If you look at their SERP for cowboys you see the Dallas Cowboys site dominate the top of the page. This is because they have been given a mass of extra links by Google, called SiteLinks. These special links are only given to the site that takes No.1 position for the term. Once they loose this position to cowboys.com, these will disappear.

Just this week Google gave webmasters the ability to customize and control those links, which has raised their value considerably. A site can now use the extra links to promote key areas of their site. Considering that the Dallas Cowboys are one of the only teams in the NFL to sell merchandise directly, these could have become very useful. As Aaron writes, Google Sitelinks Increase the Value of Generic Domains, … by a Lot.

In my view though the main problem was that the Dallas Cowboys didn’t think long term on this deal. Yes $275′000 is a lot of money but not when you look at a 5 or 10 year payback period, as most domainers do on a regular basis. Especially on an asset which was only going to increase in value over that time.