.info .net .org .com Does it really matter?

Honestly it's really hard to say, but I'll tell you what I've experienced over the years. Your mileage may vary.

.edu and .org are the easiest to get spidered and ranked. My theory is .edus are hard to get without being an educational institution, and .orgs are rarely used for business.

.net and .com have always been the same for me. I have had .net domains take off big time just like the .coms do.

.info is a waste of time. Not only do they look bad, but they're hard to rank as well. Plus at 99 cents a piece there are way too many of them out there, and most of them are crap. My theory on these is that google treats them as crap for the reasons I posted above. I rarely see .info domains being ranked.

That being said I still don't think it's a really big factor. There is no "magic bullet" or large factor in SEO with the exception of inbound links. But I would still avoid the .infos if you can.

I'm not an SEO expert, but from my experience in doing a couple of niche sites it is easier to rank high for a keyword if you are using a .com .net or .org.

However, there are instances when people manage to rank high with .info domains. I remember seeing a warrior here who had a .info and managed to get a lot of traffic to it through article marketing. Therefore, it made him money and i believe he managed to get ranked in the 2nd page of Google for his keyword which had a lot of competition. I'm sure he worked hard for this though.

If you are debating on getting a .info or .com, just go for the .com. Don't over think it and in the end you'll be glad you went with the .com.

Also, if the site you make does not turn out as successful as you were hoping then you can always sell it. And selling a .com domain is heck of a lot easier than a .info.

This is just my opinion though, like I said I'm no SEO expert but this is what noticed here in the forums and by testing it out myself.

Yes, it matters because it takes people few minutes or seconds to remember .com compare to others. To me it matters

Alot of people will say .info and .com are the same. Personally i have noticed .info not ranking as high and also taking alot longer to get spidered than a .com
Google is changing its algorithm everyday so it will be hard to get a straight clear cut answer

if you run a search on this forum you will find a HUGE thread on it, btw, this is not the place to ask these type of questions bud, this belongs in the ppc, seo, and adsense part of the forum.

Thank you one and all for the great and speedy responses.

And askloz - both points taken. thanks for being great about it.

not really sometime its matter but if you are doing good backlinking for any domain that doesnt matter a lot.

I have a domain with .info and it took weeks just to get indexed by google. Not sure if its because of the .info though.

Any domain apart from .info seemed to have worked well for me personally. I am currently getting rid of my .info domains.

I think it doesn't matter.

For someone on a budget an .info domain would be great. Btw, I never knew .info was associated with spyware sites, until I've heard it somewhere here on the forums
and I have a feeling that a lot of regular people don't really care too, unless you're marketing to marketers it doesn't really matter if you use .info or anything else.
Regular folks can't tell the difference, well most of them, I assume.

In my opinion? No.

Pretty much nobody else agrees with me, though.

I usually go with .com and .net, both have good results. I have been avoiding .info as to human eyes, it look like crap site.

If you want to know if they have any effect on your SEO campaigns, do a search in Google for your main keywords and take a count on the various domains. For some reasons, for certain niches, Google likes .com more. For certain niches, .orgs get ranked more frequently. You might want to take this into account.

I always feed what Google wants. If G likes .org for the keyword, I feed it a .org. Same to other domains.

Daniel

I have a couple of .infos that are doing very nicely, though I have no idea if the .coms would have done any better. They're owned by others and are idling around on the bottom of cyberspace somewhere wearing parked pages. I'm not sure how anyone could say for certain that a .com would do better - the sites would have to be identical in every other respect before you could draw a definite conclusion.

In terms of what's possible I don't think there's any difference - whether it's harder work to get a .info to perform than the equivalent .com I wouldn't know. The .infos I have that perform were almost acquired by accident - not expecting much from them I did the minimum amount of work with them and left them to get on with it and they did better than I thought they would. Still pondering that one, but mostly I don't think .infos deserve their bad reputation - it's as much a matter of what the competition is doing with the equivalent .coms etc as it is anything else, whether they're just parked or have an active site on them.

Experience has taught me that .org will do better quicker than .net and so faced with the choice I will always go for .org now if the .com is gone.

I do not think that make any difference but If you are optimizing for uk and if your domain ends with co.uk then you get more trust with that .

I don't think its too crucial myself. Think about the site and what it offers. In my mind, .com .net are commercial in nature, .org less so.

I have a article directory which I chose to have a .info for because it made sense to me as thats what the site is all about.

I am going to amble over to the SEO section now (thanks Loz for reminding us of it) and see if anyone can tell me if or why sub domains are crap. For example if you are called Joe Doe and you got joedoe.com (good if you want to brand your name) why would it be a bad thing to create a sub for all your ventures - ensuring an exact keyword match - eg. best-forex-reviews.joedoe.com etc. etc.