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
-
Redirect to a new domain and seo effects
I created a one page blogger with listing of several affiliated websites.It gained some visibility on google but it was very plain so i decided to create a wordpress more complex and fancy and to reach the top of search positions. At the moment i decided to keep the listing on blogger and add some links on the page saying "i've moved to a new website. click for more info" and it redirects to my page. But i dont get many clicks to my new site so i was thinking to maybe create a full redirect from my blogger to my wordpress or a iframe to fetch the wordpress but im afraid it may hurt my seo on my blogger. what should i do? thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | cardealpt0 -
Should I be concerned about Google indexing an old domain if the listings redirect to the new domain?
I noticed this about Moz's old domain SEOMoz.org. If the URLs from the old domain are redirecting, is there any reason to be concerned about an old domain still appearing to be indexed by Google? See here: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=site%3Aseomoz.org Links to seomoz.org are listed, but if you click them they redirect to moz.com. Is this anything to be concerned about or is everything operating as expected?
Technical SEO | | 352inc0 -
How to prevent duplicat content issue and indexing sub domain [ CDN sub domain]?
Hello! I wish to use CDN server to optimize my page loading time ( MaxCDN). I have to use a custom CDN sub domain to use these services. If I added a sub domain, then my blog has two URL (http://www.example.com and http://cdn.example.com) for the same content. I have more than 450 blog posts. I think it will cause duplicate content issues. In this situation, what is the best method (rel=canonical or no-indexing) to prevent duplicate content issue and prevent indexing sub domain? And take the optimum service of the CDN. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Godad0 -
Does bait and switch redirecting affect SEO?
Yeah, the question might be an odd one, but I'm new to SEO. Currently we've been considering creating links to certain pages on our site that instantly redirect to a landing page like this (referring to it as bait and switch redirecting): http://www.ecornell.com/certificate-programs/human-resources-management-training/advanced-certificate-in-strategic-hr-management/crt/ILRASHRC1/?lp=http://info.ecornell.com/executive-certificate-in-hr-leadership%3Fls=xxx%26of=xxx This essentially causes the user to "hop" from the content page directly to the landing page. Now, the content page is indexed otherwise, so I'm wondering if time on page (which is basically 0) or anything else might affect page rank. Also, if this is something we shouldn't do, that'd be great to know too. It feels sort of dirty, but I can't find any resources telling me it's bad, or how it would affect pagerank. I've read about pagejacking, but this doesn't seem to fall into the same category. Thanks! Alan
Technical SEO | | amccarty0 -
How does robots.txt affect aliased domains?
Several of my sites are aliased (hosted in subdirectories off the root domain on a single hosting account, but visible at www.theSubDirectorySite.com) Not ideal, I know, but that's a different issue. I want to block bots from viewing those files that are accessible in subdirectories on the main hosting account, www.RootDomain.com/SubDirectorySite/, and force the bots to look at www.SubDirectorySite.com instead. I utilized the canonical meta tag to point bots away from the sub directory site, but I am wondering what will happen if I use robots.txt to block those files from within the root domain. Will the bots, specifically Google bot, still index the site at its own URL, www.AnotherSite.com even if I've blocked that directory with Disallow: /AnotherSite/ ? THANK YOU!!!
Technical SEO | | michaelj_me0 -
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 -
External Links from own domain
Hi all, I have a very weird question about external links to our site from our own domain. According to GWMT we have 603,404,378 links from our own domain to our domain (see screen 1) We noticed when we drilled down that this is from disabled sub-domains like m.jump.co.za. In the past we used to redirect all traffic from sub-domains to our primary www domain. But it seems that for some time in the past that google had access to crawl some of our sub-domains, but in december 2010 we fixed this so that all sub-domain traffic redirects (301) to our primary domain. Example http://m.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ redirected to http://www.jump.co.za/search/ipod/ The weird part is that the number of external links kept on growing and is now sitting on a massive number. On 8 April 2011 we took a different approach and we created a landing page for m.jump.co.za and all other requests generated 404 errors. We added all the directories to the robots.txt and we also manually removed all the directories from GWMT. Now 3 weeks later, and the number of external links just keeps on growing: Here is some stats: 11-Apr-11 - 543 747 534 12-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 13-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 14-Apr-11 - 554 066 716 15-Apr-11 - 521 528 014 16-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 17-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 18-Apr-11 - 515 098 895 19-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 20-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 21-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 26-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 27-Apr-11 - 520 404 181 28-Apr-11 - 603 404 378 I am now thinking of cleaning the robots.txt and re-including all the excluded directories from GWMT and to see if google will be able to get rid of all these links. What do you think is the best solution to get rid of all these invalid pages. moz1.PNG moz2.PNG moz3.PNG
Technical SEO | | JacoRoux0