.Co Domains - Any thoughts?
-
Hi Guys
I'm not sure which section this one belongs in as I didn't see a section for domains/tlds.
I wanted an opinion on the future of .co domains. We own a gift company (www.xperiencedays.com), as well as a gift recommendation site (www.uniquegifts.net), and invested in a few gift occasion .co domains (www.birthdaygifts.co, christmasgifts.co etc). This was partly because they were cheap and easy to come by, but also with a hope that they soon gain some public recognition.
My question therefore is whether anyone within SEOMOZ has an opinion on whether .co will be widely accepted, whether they will (as google claims) be treated as a non-country specific url, and early success stories you know of, and finally whether the recent news from Overstock to rebrand as O.co (http://www.overstock.com/guides/faqs-about-o-co) is the kick start that .co need. I realize that is more than one question
-
This is the exact reason why I am hesitant to purchase and run with .CO domains. I would rather exercise all of my options to make a .com work rather than running with a .CO.
-
I, personally, am not a huge fan of .co domains from a branding perspective. I believe it easily confuses prospective clients with .com domains.
-
Just to add my four bob to this thread. We recently had the case of a client wanting to use the .co version of his business name as opposed to his .com.au. The .com belonging to a competitor. His re designed website was launched under the .co domain and the feedback from his clients and colleagues who he emailed using the .co email address was that the .co looked suspicious and spammy, as an email address firstly, and the web address was seen as something that did not resonate well with the local and international market.
I think the .co domain will take some time to be accepted for regional search engines such as Australia until the domain name becomes more readily accepted into mainstream website development and more commonplace.
-
And vice versa though? Could you end up with more traffic mistaking you for your larger competitor?
-
.co is the ccTLD for Colombia. It was packaged up by Godaddy as a TLD for 'Companies' 'Communities' 'Corporations' and other things that it doesn't represent. Buying a .co ccTLD and trying to rank in Google.com is like buying a .au ccTLD and trying to rank in .Google.com. If I had the choice between .info and .co I would go with .co for branding reasons and .info for SEO reasons. Why for SEO? Because I've seen and worked with companies that have acheived with .info but yet to do so with .co. Search "William Shakespeare" for example and look at the .info outranking the .edu's.
If I want to rank globally I'd have to pick gTLD over ccTLD but I definitely feel like I'm going against the grain here! Who's with me!?
-
I think that that is a great idea buying a .co where a competitor has the .com but i have also has to buy the .co for my company just so that no one else can do this to me. When these were first released it seem to tak an age for google to see them and rank them high but i think that now they have been around for a while google seems to be ranking them higher, although I am yet to see a .co overtake a .com in google's rankings which is annoying as they are quite expensive compared to .com or .co.uk etc but you just have to buy them so competitors cant use them againsed you.
My advice would be to buy it just encase becuase you would be very annoyed if a competitor bought it and overtook you in the rankings.
-
I agree with you on buing a .co when a competitor owns the .com.
But I think in time the .co will gain value as the public becomes less fixated with the .com's. But having a .com will always be preferred. Like having a 800 number vs a 888, 877, or 866 number. If I had to put them in order.
-
Just to add that I would personally be scared of having domainname.co if I know my competitor has domainname.com - too easy to spell it wrong and send free traffic the wrong way.
-
Casey gave a great answer, but just to add another point...
Even if they don't get public recognition in terms of appealing to customers and becoming mainstream, generic names like www.birthdaygifts.co have considerable value to domainers and affiliates, so they are definitely worth holding on to even if you don't develop them.
-
Hi,
I definitely believe Google that these won't be treated as country-specific domains, and if I were offered a keyword.co versus a keyword.info domain, I'd most certainly go with the .co. I think that it will resonate with people due to being similar to what they're used to seeing. This, of course, has nothing to do with a technical advantage: we'd like to believe that a TLD doesn't mean much from the perspective of a search engine, although you do see .com keyword-rich domains ranking better than other TLDs with the same keyword, in a lot of cases. Again, you don't want to confuse cause and effect: does the .com really help, or are .com domains usually owned by people who put up better websites? Hard to say.
When big companies use a TLD, that certainly lends some credit to it, and I think the domains you've bought are good. I don't think you've wasted your money, especially if they were quite cheap!
I wouldn't spend too much time or money buying every .co. domain under the sun, but I do think they're a better investment than many other TLDs. I don't have any stories of big successes yet, and I'd go as far as to say that the TLD is a bit too new to know what its fate will be. I do, however, doubt it will become as highly spammed and disregarded as the much-maligned .info and .biz.
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
-
Sub domains take away the pagerank/link juice of main website?
Hi all, I would like to know how sub domains will be collaborated with domain or main website in terms of authority, backlinks, link juice, etc...Link juice will be passed to sub domains from domain or vice versa? If there are large number of pages in sub domain, will that going to impact the ranking of main domain? Backlinks of sub domain are going to be a deciding factor for website ranking too? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
When sub domains take away the traffic from search; will this helps or hurts main website rankings?
Hi all, We have some of the landing pages on our sub domains which are getting ranked for our brand related queries and taking away the traffic as we don't have pages to rank for those search queries. I would like to know if this scenario hurts or helps our main website ranking as the traffic to the main website is getting diverted to sub domain. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Domain Migration Question
Lets say there is a brand that has one primary product type at different optional tiers. (Think something like SMB/Enterprise/Individual) Lets also say that 1 year ago this brand migrated from having everything under 1 domain (Domain A) to moving 2 of their product tiers to another domain (Domain B), a new domain. They have done some initial SEO work on this domain and had a pretty successful migration but it has also been decided that they are going to no longer offer one of these product tiers and they intend to eventually migrate everything back under the 1 domain (Domain A) They just are not sure whether they should do this now or later.
Algorithm Updates | | DRSearchEngOpt
During this next year or so there is also going to be some likely re-branding/design, etc...stemming from this decision, on the domain, meaning content changes and all that fun that goes into a migration/re-design/re-branding strategy. The timing of this has not been fully decided on. Here is the question: Should they a) Migrate back to Domain A first and then do the re-design or b) Keep 2 separate domains for now, figure out the re-design/re-branding, make content changes and then migrate Site A over in a year or so after all changes have been made? My concern with option a) is that they migrated a little less than 1 year ago and will be migrating back which I feel could have a negative impact on the content and the domain. The positive side I see here is that this impact could be just as large even if we waited so doing this now might be a better, more efficient use of our time if we can migrate and make content changes fairly close together or concurrently.
My concern with option b) is that the tier they no longer offer makes up the majority of that sites business and traffic, leaving us with not much in terms of content that ranks well and garners much traffic. Trying to optimize for the remaining product tier by itself on it's own domain could be quite hard and then having to migrate it in a year or so back to Domain A could negatively impact any small organic impact I can make on applicable pages/domain. Does anybody have any input here? I am leaning towards Option A and but wanted to get some other opinions. Thanks Everybody! Edit: So far, this has received a lot of views but no input. I am hoping to have a bit of a dialog on this so any ideas or input is welcome.0 -
Domain Authority Just Wont Budge
I've put off asking this question for a long time because I know what the short answer is, but I've been working the SEO on http://www.photojennette.com for almost a year now pretty constantly and all of the measurements are positives except for authority. Traffic has more than doubled, links sending visits has doubled, external followed links is 500% up, keywords sending is way up, pages within the site have way more links and are more diverse in their own SEO, but no matter what I can't get PA and DA to budge. In fact at one point DA dropped a point or two. (although OSE and Moz Analytics shown that competitors lost a point or two at the same time so I didn't think much of it.) I feel like I had a good grasp on what helps DA but I'm starting to question that. Anyone have any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | jonnyholt0 -
Why is my domain URL ranking instead of individual pages?
Hello, Google is ranking my homepage for many keywords instead of showing the various sites pages? Any idea why? Thanks, David
Algorithm Updates | | DavidSpivac0 -
2 Domains With Same Name But 1 With A Number
We have been marketing a website for a client with a domain name example2.com. Their main site example.com is used to post information about their services and example2.com is their eCommerce site they use to sell their products. After the Google Penguins update, we have lost all rankings for example2.com. We did not do any unethical, black hat SEO and I am pretty sure its wasn't just mistakenly blocked. We use the same strategy for our other clients and they have not been impacted. Do you guys think the domain name has anything to do with it? Whats odd it example.com is now ranking for some keywords that example2.com used to rank for. We have never marketed that website or anyone else for that matter. I have been scratching my head over this one for the past week and this is the only feasible problem I can think of.
Algorithm Updates | | ArgosSEM0 -
Google.co.uk vs pages from the UK - anyone noticed any changes?
We've started to notice some changes in the rankings of Google UK and Google pages from the UK. Pages from the UK have always typically ranked higher, however it seems like these are slipping, and Google UK pages (pages from the web) are climbing. We've noticed a similar thing happening in the Bing/Yahoo algorithm as well. Just wondered if anyone else has anyone else noticed this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0 -
How is important domain age now?
Just as topic states, how important do you think domain age is? Do you think getting old domain for the new website will do any difference? Lets say website A used to sell apples... went out of business after 5 years of business. If I would get that domain and will star selling apples again can I expect some extra boost because of the age? Cheers
Algorithm Updates | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0