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
-
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 -
Domain prefix changed, will this impact SEO?
Our web development team have changed our domain prefix from www to non www due to a server change. Our SSL certificate would not be recognised under www and would produce a substantial error message when visiting the secure parts of our website. To prevent issues with old links they have added a permanent 301 redirect from www. to non www. urls until our sitemap catches up. Would this impact our SEO efforts or would it have no impact as a redirect has been placed? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Jseddon920 -
SEO value of InDesign pages?
Hi there, my company is exploring creating an online magazine built with Adobe's InDesign toolset. If we proceeded with this, could we make these pages "as spiderable" as normal html/css webpages? Or are we limited to them being less spiderable, or not at all spiderable?
Technical SEO | | TheaterMania1 -
Correct linking to the /index of a site and subfolders: what's the best practice? link to: domain.com/ or domain.com/index.html ?
Dear all, starting with my .htaccess file: RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | inlinear
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.inlinear.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://inlinear.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.html
RewriteRule ^(.)index.html$ http://inlinear.com/ [R=301,L] 1. I redirect all URL-requests with www. to the non www-version...
2. all requests with "index.html" will be redirected to "domain.com/" My questions are: A) When linking from a page to my frontpage (home) the best practice is?: "http://domain.com/" the best and NOT: "http://domain.com/index.php" B) When linking to the index of a subfolder "http://domain.com/products/index.php" I should link also to: "http://domain.com/products/" and not put also the index.php..., right? C) When I define the canonical ULR, should I also define it just: "http://domain.com/products/" or in this case I should link to the definite file: "http://domain.com/products**/index.php**" Is A) B) the best practice? and C) ? Thanks for all replies! 🙂
Holger0 -
Umlaut in domain
Hi, My client wants to expand it's business to Germany and logically we need a domain name to match. We've found a great one and regsiterd several variants to it. However I just found out that in Germany it is possible (while here it's not) to register a domain with an umlaut. My question is: will google assign more value to: schädlinge.de than schadlinge.de when users search for schädlinge? If yes, how large will the difference be? (I will use an umlaut in the title etc) Kind regards,
Technical SEO | | media-surfer
Jason.0 -
Mobile Domain Setup
Hi, If I want to serve a subset of pages on my mobile set from my desktop site or the content is significantly different, i.e. it is not one to one or pages are a summarised version of the desktop, should I use m.site.com or is it still better to use site.com? Many thanks any help appreciated.
Technical SEO | | MarkChambers0 -
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 -
How to 301 multiple domain names to a single domain
Hey, I tried to find and answer to this seemingly simple question, but no luck. So, I have one domain name with a website attached to it. I also registered all the other domain names that are similar to it or have different extensions - I want to redirect all the other domain names to my one main domain name without getting penalised by the big G. It looks like this: www.mainsite.com - this is my main domain I also have www.mainsite.com.au, www.mainsite.org, and www.mainsite.org.au which I all want to just redirect to www.mainsite.com I have been told that the best way to do this is a 301 redirect, but to do that you need to make a CNAME for all the other domains that points to www.mainsite.com. My problem is that I cannot seem to create a CNAME record for http://mainsite.com - I have it working for http://www.mainsite.com but not the non www record. What should I be doing differently? Is it just my DNS provider is useless? Thanks, Anthony
Technical SEO | | Grenadi0