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
-
Using one domain for email and another domain for your website, but redirects...
Hello - We are rebranding and our new name is fairly lengthy. We own all main domain versions of our brand name - .com, .new and .org - There is a very high search volume for the new brand name as it is a merger of 2 popular existing brands so want to take advantage of that and use our full name within our website domain name. However, since the name is a little long as mentioned - 25 characters - we also own the 3 character acronym of the new brand so we are debating on using the acronym for our new email addresses. ie name@abc.com so it is user friendly. We would obviously redirect the acronym email domain to point to the longer website domain. Are there any negative SEO effects if we do that? Use the longer domain for the website and shorter acronym for our email? Thank you
Technical SEO | | KRBishopBh1 -
Plugins and SEO
I'd like some expert guidance. I've searched for a theme that does what I want and finally found something I like, but I'm wondering what you all think I should do to increase it's searchability. The plugin has all the listings and styling. All I need to do is past the code into the wordpress site ad voila! I have a page. Using the widget lets me allow upvotes and provide map etc. But it means the content is inside the widget instead of on the page. What would you modify if you wanted to keep the theme & widget to get the best results. http://best-of-sacramento.com/dentists This is my staging site.
Technical SEO | | julie-getonthemap1 -
One-Pager and SEO
We're building a page that is going to feature over 31 people as difference makers in their field. We're unveiling one a day for an entire month. The very early mockup of the page has name, pic, some bio info, and a link to open up a new window with the full bio. I would love to have all of the bio content for all of the people on the page (and indexable), but I'm not sure how to do that while still being able to hide the full bios until they are expanded. Anybody have any tips that are SEO-friendly and/or examples of a page that is built like this and ranks well. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | spackle0 -
301 redirect after penalty to domain which currently 301 to the penalised domain
Hello all, As I have mentioned in another Q&A, one of our new clients got hit by manual penalty. I checked their link profile and there was a lot of black hat involved. Long story sort, I submitted a reconsiderationr equest which was not enough as it seems 99,9% of his links are bad links. We took the decision to move a newly launched web site from www.websitename.com to www.website-name.com with the latter being an old domain name with good authority and clean link profile. The problem is that at the moment the www.website-name.com is set to 301 redirect to www.websitename.com and what we want to do now is take the web site off www.websitename.com and launch (not 301 as we dont want to pass the penalty to the clean domain) it to www.website-name.com. What is the best practise for this particular case and are there any things i should pay attention to? I would appreciate your advise!
Technical SEO | | artdivision0 -
Domain redirect
Recently we launched a site under a new domain, the site is doing well under the URL. Client calls me today and would like to have another domain he owns point to the new site. The domain he has has no history and no content. He is under the impression that people are looking for him by typing in www.domainxyz.com. I attempted to explain otherwise to him, but I lost. Question, what are the drawbacks of taking this domin and doing a perm redirect via . Httpaccess file?
Technical SEO | | VanadiumInteractive0 -
Domain authority not showing on root domain?
I was going through our site earlier w/ the mozBar (still learning the tools, new here) and saw the attached image. There were far more links to the subdomain (#s on the left) than the root domain (#s on right). This is strange to me, because we are not using any subdomains. All links point to either our root domain or subfolders off our root domain. Is this hurting our ranking for the root domain? Not sure what's up with this. Zz9j0.jpg
Technical SEO | | askotzko0 -
I have a site that has both http:// and https:// versions indexed, e.g. https://www.homepage.com/ and http://www.homepage.com/. How do I de-index the https// versions without losing the link juice that is going to the https://homepage.com/ pages?
I can't 301 https// to http:// since there are some form pages that need to be https:// The site has 20,000 + pages so individually 301ing each page would be a nightmare. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | fthead90 -
.us domains vs .com - What does Google Think?
Suppose I had 2 domains, carloans.us & carloans.com with exactly the same links profiles, and content (not duplicate but you know what I mean). Would Google favour the .com domain? In my experience, yes. But I might be wrong?
Technical SEO | | Tom-R
Same with other not so standard domains like .biz etc. Am I right to believe that Google can prefer the more common domain extensions?0