The official IVIP9 domain, and how a copy differs

An address is the one piece of information available before anything happens, and the one most often misread — because the part that catches the eye and the part that matters are rarely the same part.

What an address is made of

An address has three parts, and only one of them tells you who owns it.

The patterns imitations use

These four cover most of what turns up, and all four rely on a reader checking only whether the brand name appears somewhere.

• The brand as a subdomain of somebody else's domain: the name really is in the address, but the domain is not theirs
• A single letter swapped or added, which at a glance reads as identical
• The same domain label with a different ending
• The brand name in the path after the slash, which the domain owner writes freely

All four are ruled out by reading one place: the label next to the ending. If that does not match, nothing else needs checking.

Keeping a correct address of your own

Memorising an address is fragile, because memory is not reliable at the level of individual characters. Checking one carefully and saving it as a bookmark is sturdier — and then using the bookmark instead of searching again.