Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do Domain Extensions such as .com or .net affect SEO value?
-
In the beginning of SEO days, it was going around that .com is the best for SEO and that .net is not as good. Is there any truth to this, and what about .org or .edu?
I always hear that .edu sites have high PR.
Is there any rhyme or reason to this, or all they all equal?
Thank you,
Afshin
-
Really didn't respond to the actual question though. Instead you just bragged about how you can get ranked quickly, and how it doesn't matter to you much, blah blah. You should try focusing on the inquiry itself and not describing what you do and how clever that is...
-
Yes Francisco, i do see what you mean. you know something though? if i were really digging deep and needed a short domain niche and decided to corner the internet with it... well... gee. i think it would really matter more on just how large a pocket i want or just how polished i want to be.
but frankly i can seo and rank deep pages on any site with very long url strings, so why bother?
personally some SEO stuff is way over the top and when you can earn money with millions of niches on even long tailed keyword phrases on any given web site, well... i'm just happy i need not be so damn serious about it.
i can whip up another blog in 8 hours, get indexed and drive traffic and ranked with 7 days time, therefore going over the top and analyzing every single nock and granny is simply not neccessary for the average marketer. or even the serious marketer.
it solely depends on how much competition there is on the 1st search result page before i'll ever make finer adjustments.but it doesn't mean to say that i will stop activity. i will however make sure i remain stable. but to hit number 1 spot is not my concern. being anywhere on the first 5 search pages is plenty good for me.
i guess im not greedy lol
thats my take anyway
PS: I would most certainly take on *.com, *.org, *edu or *.net before any other extention as well
-
First I would say that I dont like the www on domains names and i belueve uit will fade away sometime as it is not nessasary and will make urls look old fashioned. Its a good point that some may type in the www, but i believe that is a small amount fo people.
Matt Cutts has mentioend cheap domain TLDS are associalited with spam in a few videos, while this does not mean they rank them lower, i would not risk it.
The best reason not to use them is conversion, they look cheap and spammy, i would always prefere a .com, .net or .org
-
To add on what Lonnie said, the way things are now is that the human perception of domain names is almost more important than Google's. However, I'm assuming that you're referring to backlinks, and not actual domain names (since you already have a highly ranked .com domain name). In the past .edu links were considered more important, but personally I believe that Google is no longer weighing them heavier due to abuse of .edu links. I think that (theoretically) Google is more satisfied with the Panda update and how that interprets textual content for domain strength as opposed to what three letter suffix the domain ends in.
Apologies if I misunderstood your question, and you were considering going with a .org/.net/etc domain for your site.
-
"There is no difference technically for SEO optmization on a given web site with any domain name extentions"
Sorry Lonnie, I have to disagree with you a little:
I have to put in this article that Rand wrote a while back:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
The only TLDs I would buy are .com, .net, .org. Forget all the rest because I never see them in google anyway (info, tv, biz, whatever)
-
Hi Afshin,
Having being online for such a long experience, here is my conclusion to your question.
Technically there is absolutely no difference which domain extension you wanna use for SEO, however... there is another type of SEO which is associated through representation.
Whenever I visit a friend that merely surfs the net for kicks, they would always add www at the beginning of the domain to find the site through their Internet Browser. You will seldom find someone who will use http:// or simply type in the domain.
This is also true when it comes to .com or .net. - *.com associates commercial content and *.net is more or less regarded as a backup to *.com. Therefore when somebody seeks a site, the *.com is always primary.
On another hand we have .org or .edu - .org is automatically regarded as **charitabl*e** organization in our minds while *.edu is regarded as educational like a college, school or university.
And... on another note *.com and *.org were the first domain name extensions on the Internet. I would probably say these domains would have more links pointing to each other than any other domain extension. So if you want to build a web site portal or a new search engine the *.com would be the most likely candidate due the vast number of links or sites on the Internet.
My conclusion:
There is no difference technically for SEO optmization on a given web site with any domain name extentions but nowadays new *.com extensions are registered on v6 IP structures. However *.com has more pull socially and *.org has more pull in a chartible way. Now... if I was looking for a Christian site and if i saw Christian-Way.com and Christian-Way.org, I would most likely visit the *.org site first.
This is my take anyway. Hope that helped.
Cheers
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New theme adds ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to all URL's as part of cache. How does this affect SEO
New theme I am working in ads ?v=1d20b5ff1ee9 to every URL. Theme developer says its a server setting issue. GoDaddy support says its part of cache an becoming prevalent in new themes. How does this impact SEO?
Technical SEO | | DML-Tampa0 -
How much difference does .co.uk vs .com for SEO make?
My Website has a .com domain. However I have noticed that for local businesses all of them have a .co.uk (UK business) TLD (check plumbers southampton for example). I have also noticed that on checking my serp rankings, I'm on page 1 if searched on Google.com but page 2 if searched on google.co.uk. Now being UK based I would assume most of my customers will be redirected to google.co.uk so I'm wondering how much of an impact this actually makes? Would it be worth purchasing .co.uk domain and transferring my website to that? Or run them both at the same time and set up 301 direct on my .com to .co.uk? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Marvellous0 -
Coming soon SEO
Hi, I was wondering what is the best practice to redirect all the links juice by redirecting all the pages of your website to a coming soon page. The coming soon page will point to the domain.com, not to a subfolder. Should I move the entire website to a subfolder and redirect this folder to the coming soon page? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Clients domain expired - rankings lost - repurchased domain - what next?
Its only been 10 days and i have repurchased the domain name/ renewed. The who is info, website and contact information is all still the same. However we have lost all rankings and i am hoping that our top rankings come back. Does anyone have experience with such a crappy situation?
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
International Seo - Canada
Our organization is currently only operating in the USA but will soon be entering the Canadian market. We did a lot of research and decided that for our needs it would be best to use a subfolder for Canada. Initially we will be targeting the english speaking community but eventually we will want to expand to the french speaking Canadians as well. The question is - is there a preferred version in setting up the subfolders: www.website.org/ca/ -- default will be english www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french www.website.org/en-ca/ - english www.website.org/fr-ca/ - french www.website.org/ca/en/ -english www.website.org/ca/fr/ - french Thanks
Technical SEO | | Morris770 -
Any way around buying hosting for an old domain to 301 redirect to a new domain?
Howdy. I have just read this QA thread, so I think I have my answer. But I'm going to ask anyway! Basically DomainA.com is being retired, and DomainB.com is going to be launched. We're going to have to redirect numerous URLs from DomainA.com to DomainB.com. I think the way to go about this is to continue paying for hosting for DomainA.com, serving a .htaccess from that hosting account, and then hosting DomainB.com separately. Anybody know of a way to avoid paying for hosting a .htaccess file on DomainA.com? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SamTurri0 -
What is the best method to block a sub-domain, e.g. staging.domain.com/ from getting indexed?
Now that Google considers subdomains as part of the TLD I'm a little leery of testing robots.txt with something like: staging.domain.com
Technical SEO | | fthead9
User-agent: *
Disallow: / in fear it might get the www.domain.com blocked as well. Has anyone had any success using robots.txt to block sub-domains? I know I could add a meta robots tag to the staging.domain.com pages but that would require a lot more work.0 -
Issue with .uk.com domain
hi i have rockshore.uk.com which is not indexing properly. the internal pages do not show up for the text they have on them, or the title tags. the site is on aekmps shops platform. I understand that a .uk.com is not a proper TLD but i think i have a subdomain of .uk.com Can anyone help? thanks
Technical SEO | | Turkey0