Synthetic Sweetener Titans Swallow Splenda URLs

Having learned a lesson from Coca-Cola and its labor adversaries in South America, who snatched the domain KillerCoke.org to air their grievances over union deaths in Bogota-area bottling plants, the makers of synthetic sweetener Splenda are gorging themselves on hundreds of negative Splenda URLs — all in the name of curbing bad PR. That’s according to Sustainable is Good, which has an extensive list of the URLs in question at the above-linked articlel.

The list of lambasting links goes on and on, including such basics as splendasucks.net (plus .org, .biz, and .info) and splendakills.net as well as more elaborate word combos like splendatoxicitycenter.com (.net, .org, etc.). They were purchased by two firms, Splenda manufacturer Tate&Lyle and U.S. partner J&J. Looks like SplendaKills.com is already taken though. Ouch. That’s a bitter pill that 20 packs of Sucralose aren’t likely to sweeten. Still, how much does the particular domain matter? If you have something negative to say about a brand, you’ll likely ave no problem finding a place to say it online — even if it’s just a MySpace sub-URL. Direct navigation traffic can’t hold a candle to optimized search traffic. (via seth godin)