Domain Question
-
Hello fellow SEOmozers!
I'm trying to register a domain name that contains keywords for my business, however the .com is obviously taken (however its just a parked domain without a site) so I have an option to get either .co .us or .net
I wanted to know if the domain extension makes any difference for the search engine or does having .com gives you an advantage over having .co .us or .net?
Thanks for your input!!!
-
Thanks for a quick reply, I made a mistake in my previous post. The domain names that I was referring to were itsupportla.net and itsupportla.com ...
-
Hi Igor,
Although keyword rich domains do seem to hold weight with Google, I wouldn't recommend going so specific as to include the location (itsupportla)
To me itsupport.net is a great domain name, it's short, it's professional, and it tells both Google and your users exactly what you do.
If you have that domain, then it sounds like a winner to me.
Saying that, if itsupport.com is available but only showing a parking page, it might be worth finding the owner via WHOIS and seeing what it would take to get them to part ways with it. I've had some success with this in the past, often the domains belong to people who simply never got around to finishing projects they started, and are delighted to let them go for a few hundred dollars.
Best of luck
David
-
Hello EGOL,
Yes that is on my to do list.
Thank you!
-
David, if I may ask for your professional opinion in regards to domain names. I provide IT services to small and medium size business, haven't advertised online or did any kind of marketing in the last 5 years. I currently have a website (which I am in the process of completely redesigning and optimizing for SEO) which is 911PCTECH.com
I did a little research of my top competitors for similar services and found out that IT Support LA is a very high volume keyword phrase with very low competition. I went out and got the itsupport.net and itsupport.us (itsupport.com is not available and there is no website built) My services are locally based (southern California mostly) from the 3 domains which would you recommend I use? I read the article that Kevin suggested above, and it recommends to use keyword rich domain names, so do you think its better for me to switch sites and start using itsupportla.net or .us? Thanks again!
-
Contact the registrant and see if you can buy it!
-
Thank you David for the clear explanation!
-
Thank you Kevin! The article did clear things up for me.
-
Hi Igor,
The quality of the domain extension will only play a minuscule role in your overall SEO efforts, so it's not something that should keep you up at night. However, you should take note of the following points:
-
If you are looking at localised TLD's (.us, .co.uk etc), you will essentially telling Google that your site is primarily directed at that country, and it means you could struggle to rank elsewhere. I would therefore suggest always using a multi-national domain (.com, .net etc) if you intend to market your site globally
-
From a user point of view, a more recognisable domain extension indicates more trust in a site, and correlation data suggests that Google reflects this in their algorithm. By this, I mean that if a user looks at your domain and thinks 'that looks a bit spammy', then it would be justified to think that Google would think the same.
This doesn't just mean the domain extension, but the domain as a whole. There are occasions where people are so desperate to get a .com they get a ridiculous domain that no one would trust.
Look at these domains, which seems more trustworthy:
www.your-product-online-4u.com
**www.yourproduct.net **
You want your overall domain name to be short, memorable and as clean as possible.
Although people will generally trust a .com over a .net, don't make the mistake of sacrificing the entire domain for a better extension (as it the example above)
Thanks,
David
-
-
SEOmoz has some best practices: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain (further reading http://www.seomad.com/SEOBlog/do-different-tlds-affect-seo.html)
Top-level Domain (TLD)
Top level domains (like .com) are the extensions associated with domain names. For best ranking results, avoid uncommon top-level domains (TLDs). Like hyphens, TLDs such as .info, .cc, .ws, and .name are spam indicators.
IMHO, I do believe it is better to have a .com. But ultimately, this is just one factor of hundreds...
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
-
What happens to your domain authority if you are forced to change your website name?
Out of curiosity if for legal reason you or a client were forced to change their domain name, what happens to all of your domain authority once you lose the old domain? While you still own the domain you can easily redirect any old links to your new website, but what happens if you no longer own that domain and someone else purchases it? Do they steal all of your domain authority? Or is it possible to keep those old links pointing toward your website?
Link Building | | SteveKettig0 -
Question about reciprocal link building. I'm not an SEO professional, just a local service business owner.
I did a link page on my website 13 years ago and never took it down. Should we scratch that page all together? Is it ok with Google to do a page on Recommended local service providers. Maybe I can keep some of those reciprocal links if that's the case...
Link Building | | FVLMS0 -
Does a domain that has migrated or expired that points to my site affect my backlink profile.
I'm new to backlink auditing and I'm certain that the website in question is a link directory anyway. It's spam score isn't high, so in theory it looks okay but in actual fact the webhosting has expired. How badly do these types of broken inbound links affect my site?
Link Building | | Omar_aw0 -
Backlinks from ads on parked domains? Is this possible?
Hello Moz Friends, So as I was researching some competitive backlinks and I noticed a lot of backlinks that a clients competitor has are on parked domains and they appear to be google ads from some point. You know the pages that this page no longer exists, or hey do you want to buy this domain? and it has like 6 google ads on it? Yep those pages. My clients industry is construction and their competitor has links from zombie websites, foreign, websites and more. But the links are no longer on the page. Like when it was crawled, their ad was showing. Does this make any sense and is it usually temporary? Thank you for your thoughts friends!
Link Building | | asbchris0 -
How Effective Are Links Between The Same Company's Websites With Different Domain Extensions?
Morning! The main competitor of an eCommerce site I'm working on has a total of 31 sites for 31 different countries. Each one of these sites has a different domain extension (.com, .co.uk, .fr, .it etc.), and every single one of these sites' pages links to all the other homepages through a dropdown menu on the navigation bar. When I pop the .co.uk URL (our main competitor) into Open Site Explorer, I'm advised they have a 45,079 links from 475 domains. If I look at 'just discovered' links, most are from their own sites - I guess MOZ picks these up every time a new page is created. Now, these guys are huge in the UK. They rank in the top 10 for pretty much every single search term and, to put it into some kind of perspective, their Search Metrics score is 33,000 compared to our measly 160! Don't get me wrong, they do get some decent links from authoritative sites, but it seem most of their links are from their own sites. How does Google view these? Does my competitor have these thousands of 'internal' backlinks to thank for their current position? I've just checked their .kr URL and this has 12.5 million(!) links from just 450 domains. Do every single one of these links pass equity? Or does Google just look at one from each domain? Thanks, Lewis
Link Building | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
2 backlinking questions
I've got 2 questions regarding backlinking. 1 - I recently watched a webinar saying I should never get backlinks from any sites lower than a PR 3. However, I have found some relevant websites to our niche that are lower than that. We have recently set-up a new website that currently has a PR 0. Bearing that in mind do you think it was still be good for SEO to try and get links from the lower PR sites to build up our own PR? 2 - Has anyone found out what Google thinks of gaining links from domains hosted in other countries? For example, our websites are hosted in the UK, does it look suspicious to search engines if we have links from USA or other countries? Thanks
Link Building | | AAttias0 -
What value do external broken links give to a domain?
I ask, as I've just used opensite explorer to look at external links a competitor has, and I've found the high value ones at the top of the list go to a page that no longer exists on their site. Are these stiill of value in the SERP's, or have they messed up by not putting a 301 redirect on them?
Link Building | | xposurecreative0