How Much Harder (if at all) Is It to Rank a .info domain?

[braincandy7]

I am in a position where i would ideally like to buy 20 or so domains with which to build mini product specific sites.

Money is an issue. I know i can buy most of these as .com at 0.99 right now which is not a problem. But in a years time i will be hit with a $200 bill when i want to renew these domains. Hopefully that won't be an issue at the time but who can plan that far ahead.

If i were to buy .info domain of course the long term cost is greatly reduced. However I can't seem to get a definitive answer to the threads title question:

How much harder to rank a .info domain? Is it really an obstacle? Is it a "little bit" harder or "a lot harder"

[adamze]

I think it depends on your purpose of buying a domain. If you are getting them for tracking or redirecting them, then .info's are fine but if you want to rank them, they are definitely harder to rank.
A simple check is to browse through serps for a couple of low competition keywords and check for .infos. You will hardly find any. Also check their age and backlinks to get an idea.

[MikeFriedman]

.info's cost just as much to renew. They don't renew for $1.99.

[xiro25]

Just buy a few .com for right now. and build a adsense site or some other site to make money.

.info are no different than any other domain. good content and good backlinks will always win.

You dont need to buy 20 domains. just start out with a few to start making some money then go from there.

[braincandy7]

I don't intend to buy 20 in one go. But my goal is to have 2-3 sites completed per week for the next month of two.

They are mini sites so my plan is to get a fair few up as once they are online i just need to concentrate on backlinking.

[Mr.H]

info's renew is like com's
so go for some com's domains

PS : where did you found 0.99 com's ?? 1and1 ??

[legitebiz]

Hi braincandy7,

I have personally used .info domains because when I first started with IM a few years back I knew no different and I found a .info I liked and I bought it.

I did not get it because I thought it was better or worse than a .com, it simply was available for the keyword I was targeting. Now, this domain ranks pretty good in the search engines after some link building I have done over the years.

Also, I recently started a campaign where I am targeting a keyword with 55,600,000 results (1,730,000 in quotes) and after a few weeks using a .info domain I am already in page #1 of Google, still position 9, but first page.

I do think that ranking with these is just a little bit harder though, because even though Google algorithms have changed over the years (and now you see for example that Google will consider relevant a synonym and not only the exact words in the search), it still gives a lot of credit to exact matches. The thing is that a .info domain has one more letter in the extension, which I think may dilute the relevance of your domain for a particular keyword a little more.

Domain extensions do have an impact and Google sees them, so much so that I once made an experiment for a keyword that included the word "info" at the end as part of the search term, and guess what, Google saw the extension itself as a relevant result (it would show the extension in bold along with the words in the domain) and of course I ranked #1 for that keyword with almost no links against some tough competition.

This does not mean that Google prefers .com over .info's, or .com over .net, it is just a matter of the .info being one letter longer. Some may say of course that the .info is less sexy , but the point is that a .info, being one letter longer than a .com, may give you a small disadvantage in terms of relevance, but if you are not in very high competition niches you have nothing to worry about, a link building campaign will get you to first page of Google and the other search engines just as it would with any other extension, assuming of course that all your SEO is in order.

I hope this helps!

[ericnelsonator]

From my experience, there is no difference from SEO perspective but if you are building niche sites, in the longer run, you will definitely need to convert them into small authority sites as thin niche sites will not be favored by Google. Visitors will find .com to be more authoritative as compared to .info and I am sure if you pick the keywords right, you will be able to make many times more than just the cost of domain and hosting within a period of one year.

Eric

[braincandy7]

Thanks for your answers everyone. The result is is what i was expecting. I have some .info's which are one page so i know it can be done.