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

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!