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
-
Value of domain name for domain authority. Please help to figure out!
I am doing SEO for an appliance repair company. Their company website's domain doesn't have high authority, and I am going to increase that by link earning and content improving. I think a better domain name might also help me out. The current URL contain the word "appliance" but doesn't have "repair" in it. I am thinking a new domain that would contain both keywords will serve better. Could you please share with me your thought on this? Am I in the right direction, or not at all? I know Google penalizes mirror sites since this they are considered as duplicated content. I'll upload my content to the new domain and make the old one point to that new URL. I am wondering if canonical might help? Or 301 redirect will be a better solution? Any advise would be highly appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Domain Forwarding / Multiple Domain Names / or Rebuild Blogs on them
I am considering forwarding 3 very aged and valuable domain names to my main site. There were once over 100 blog posts on each blog and each one has a page authority of 45 and domain authority of 37. My question is should i put up three blogs on the domains and link them to my site or should i just forward the domains to my main site? Which will provide me with more value. I have the capability to have some one blog on them every day. However, i do not have access to any of the old blog posts. I guess i could scrape it of archive.org. Any advice would be appreciated. Scott
Technical SEO | | WindshieldGuy-2762210 -
How best to deal with www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html
Firstly, this is for an .asp site - and all my usual ways of fixing this (e.g. via htaccess) don't seem to work. I'm working on a site which has www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html - both URL's resolve to the same page/content. If I simply drop a rel canonical into the page, will this solve my dupe content woes? The canonical tag would then appear in both www.home.com and www.home.com/index.html cases. If the above is Ok, which version should I be going with? - or - Thanks in advance folks,
Technical SEO | | Creatomatic
James @ Creatomatic0 -
Buying multiple domains: misspells & .net, org, etc. & 301's
Hi, an SEO guy told me to buy up domains like ours X.org, net, biz, etc. & mispellings. this could cost over $100/year. Is is worth it for SEO or is it just covering our @ss if competitors want to get stupid and buy those? I don't forsee competitors doing that. What do you suggest? Does Google actually give us points for those AND if we bought them are we supposed to redirect all of them to our site? Should I be doing this for our SEO clients? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | JCunningham0 -
Buying Expired Domains
Recently i was looking to buy some good quality Expired Domains. But while performing site and links query on such domains in google, none of the domains are showing any links or pages indexed in Google but the same domains are showing hundreds of links in opensiteexplorer for that domains. So does Google has started devaluing expired domains or will expired domains recover all their rankings after re registration by us.
Technical SEO | | amit910 -
SEO Tomfoolery
Oh Hai, I recently changed the permalink structure on my Wordpress based site, southwestbreaks.co.uk from the standard ?p=123 to a more SEO chummy /%postname%/. As a result, my site has completely dropped off the board for all my previously well ranked search phrases. Having since gotten into SEOmoz a bit more, I can see there are WP plugins available that apparently would've done this a lot more smoothly. I'd be most grateful if someone could explain if this drop off is just temporary, or have I somehow entered Google's shun book? The site has been like this for about 48 hours. Thanks, Tim
Technical SEO | | Southwesttim0 -
Redirect Multiple Domains
This is a follow-up question from one posted earlier this month. I can't linked to that because it's a private question so I'm trying to summarize it below. We have a number of domains – about 20 - (e.g. www.propertysharp.com) that point to our main domain ip adress (www.propertyshark.com) and share the same content. This is no black-hat strategy whatsoever, the domains were acquired several years ago in order to help people who mistyped the websites url to reach their desired destination. The question was whether to redirect them to our main domain or not. Pros were the reportedly millions of incoming links from these domains - cons was the fact that lots of issues regarding duplicate content could arise and we actually saw lots of some pages from these domains ranking in the search engines. We were recommended to redirect them, but to take it gradually. I have a simple question - what does gradually mean - one domain per week, per month?
Technical SEO | | propertyshark0