Domain Extension Question... Are All Equal?

by 6 replies
7
Hello everybody...

I am in the midst of purchasing another domain
but I have noticed that a huge amount of .com's
are obviously taken... my question though is:

Do you think .website domains are good?
Or basically are they given the same weight
as any other extension? Or less weight etc.?

What have you all noticed about domain extensions
aside from .com? And how they are weighed?

Thanks In Advance!
Jamie
#search engine optimization #domain #equal #extension #question
  • Grab the .com

    I won't bore you with SEO advice on domain extensions. (Or, more accurately, bore the both of us.) Secure the .com. You have to think of a domain investment as a long-term investment. Whenever I purchase a domain, I always think of when I want to sell up, selling the domain and everything attached to it. The only exception would be a brandable domain. .coms sell more readily and for significantly higher prices and, though SEOs disagree, the majority do agree that the .com performs better in SERPs.

    Tom
    • [2] replies
    • Yeah. I hear ya there.

      With my next site though I am not necessarily aiming
      at SERP's but I would like to think if it was optimized
      properly that it will at least be given some weight.

      I have a .org domain that has done fairly well in SERP's but
      then again the new domain would not be from the top
      3 - .com .net .org. --- hhmm - to .website or not - hhmm.
    • The majority do not agree on that, and it makes no sense.

      A dot com has no more SERP value than anything else.

      Because .com's have been around since the beginning, and everybody
      and their brother wanted one, there are more of them.

      The sheer volume of them is why you see more of them.
      Not because they hold more weight with google.

      When making plethora of real world searches, like the real
      world does, you will find searches that include any number of tlds
      that win.

      How many people search daily for new york subway schedules?

      And anyone who thinks a dot com is somehow more sellable or
      valuable in that regard, is not dealing with reality. People today
      are used to every tld under the sun that matters, from .tv
      to .me and everything under the sun. This is not 1997.

      Paul
  • Buying a .website domain you are likely to inadvertently drive traffic to a competitor. .website is not well known, and a lot of your return traffic will type in .com out of habit.

    Google has also hinted with the flood of new TLDs hitting the market over the last 18 months that they are watching them closely. They really have never targeted a TLD before, but if spammers go crazy with all these new TLDs, it could happen.
  • .com still dominates to the point where it should be a concern if you are looking at anything else. That being said, the level of domination isn't what it once was. The younger demographics do not care about extension. But it's going to be like ten to fifteen years before the ".com or not" decision is considered irrelevant on a larger scale.

    Open your text editor and just brainstorm everything that pops into your head and then paste it into the bulk availability checker. You'll come up with something good eventually. Just start making the site now and leave the logo for last.
  • Hello Jamie, the new gTLDs have an intended use, if you think some extension especially fit with the topic of your new proyect, you could give it a try, although of course .com is great, but as you mentioned lots of them are taken.

    I don't have any proof, but I think that using the right semantic extension, let's say you have a site about news and use a .news extension could give a site a boost in the SERPs.

    In your case, if you have been considering the .website just because you didn't find an available .com and it's not relevant to you, I would keep thinking for alternative .coms until finding one.
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