Should I buy a .co domain if my preferred .com and .co.uk domain are taken by other companies?
-
I'm looking to boost my website ranking and drive more traffic to it using a keyword rich domain name. I want to have my nearest city followed by the keyword "seo" in the domain name but the .co.uk and .com have already been taken.
Should I take the plunge and buy .co at a higher price? What options do I have?
Also whilst we're on domains and URL's is it best to separate keywords in url's with a (_) or a (-)?
Many thanks for any help with this matter.
Alex
-
Just to add a couple quick points to the good answers above:
It's not possible to use the underscore "_" in domain names - not a legal character.
As far as using the .co because the .com and .co.uk are already in use - bad idea for another reason. The reality is most people are still not familiar the.co TLD (probably a bit more so in UK where they're already used to hearing .co.uk)
This means a huge number of your potential customers will accidentally type in (when going direct in the browser's URL bar and when linking from their own sites) the more common TLD, resulting in your hard promotional work sending your business to your competitors.
Not to mention the massive headaches when email addresses are accidentally written with the wrong domain ending.
The .co is an interesting addition, but it's still way too far out of the mainstream to risk as your primary domain at this stage, IMO.
Paul
-
nops for pages within the domain you should use '-' to separate it instead of '_'.
The reason why you should not do this in the main domain is because it looks spammy to many people as this is the format that most spammers use when buying keyword rich domain names...
-
"For separating keywords in the domain i would say do not use it and if it is necessary then use ‘-’ instead of ‘_’."
Should this also apply to pages within a domain?
-
Let’s talk completely about branding, I would never recommend you to go for .co domain when .com and co.uk is already taken by other companies...
It’s always an advantage to me to add keyword in the domain name but don’t push it too much if you are not getting it focus more on branding and choose a domain name that is easy to remember.
For separating keywords in the domain i would say do not use it and if it is necessary then use ‘-’ instead of ‘_’.
Hope this help!
-
You should read this really interesting post about EMDs by Dr. Pete:
Are Exact-Match Domains (EMDs) in Decline?
In your case I would just stick to a .com domain with your business name rather than a keyword rich domain. Also if you are competing in the SEO industry and you do not already rank well for your key terms, then you will find it hard to rank regardless. SEO terms are highly competitive and there are several sites offering this service that will have invested heavily in their own SEO, making it very difficult to compete.
In terms of your other question, it is generally best practice to separate words in a URL with a hyphen (-) rather than underscore (_).
Hope this helps,
Adam.
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
-
Shopify Site with Multiple Domains?
Hey there! My client has a website on Shopify. I don't even know how to open this can of worms, but let me try. The site URL is: https://mobilityequipmentforless.com/ However, there is another (older?) URL that gets updated as the main site gets updated and shows the exact same content. It's a straight duplicate, but is it's own URL and doesn't redirect to the main site. https://www.powerchairrecyclers.com/ And this isn't the SITE.Shopify back-end site name that was used for set up initially. I just have no idea what's going on here. Not sure if it's a serious error that needs to be fixed, or if it's something weird with how Shopify work. Any insight would be immensely helpful. Thanks! Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
ExampleSite.com vs ExampleSite.com.br
What would you say to a client who is concerned he'd have to run around buying his .com.??? in alot of other countries. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Duplicate content on .com .au and .de/europe/en. Would it be wise to move to .com?
This is the scenario: A webstore has evolved into 7 sites in 3 shops: example.com/northamerica example.de/europe example.de/europe/en example.de/europe/fr example.de/europe/es example.de/europe /it example.com.au .com/northamerica .de/europe/en and .com.au all have mostly the same content on them (all 3 are in english). What would be the best way to avoid duplicate content? An answer would be very much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEO-Bas0 -
Should I NoFollow Links Between Our Company Websites?
The company I work for owns and operates hundreds of websites throughout the United States. Each of these is tied to a legitimate local business many times with specific regional branding and mostly unique content. All of our domains are in pretty good shape and have not ever participated in any shady link building/SEO. These sites currently are often linking together between the other sites within their market. It makes perfect sense from a user standpoint since they would have an interest in each of the sites if they were interested in the specific offering that business had. My question is whether or not we should nofollow the links to our other sites. Nothing has happened from Google in terms of penalties and they don't seem to be hurting our sites now as they are all currently followed, but I also don't want to be on the false positive side of any future algorithm updates surrounding link quality. What do you think? Keep them followed or introduce nofollow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Using Webmaster Tools to Redirect Domain to Specific Page on Another Domain
Hey Everyone, we redirected an entire domain to a specific URL on another domain (not the homepage). We used a 301 Redirect, but I'm also wondering if I should use the Google Webmaster Tools "Change of Address" section to redirect. There is no option to redirect the old domain to the specific URL on the new domain within the "Change of Address" section. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
How do I list the subdomains of a domain?
Hi Mozers, I am trying to find what subdomains are currently active on a particular domain. Is there a way to get a list of this information? The only way I could think of doing it is to run a google search on; site:example.com -site:www.example.com The only issues with this approach is that a majority of the indexed pages exist on the non-www domain and I still have thousands of pages in the results (mainly from the non-www). Is there another way to do it in Google? OR is there a server admin online tool that will tell me this information? Cheers, Dan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | djlaidler0 -
Sub Domains vs. Persistent URLs
I've always been under the assumption that when building a micro-site it was better to use a true path (e.g. yourcompany.com/microsite) URL as opposed to a sub domain (microsite.yourcompany.com) from an SEO perspective. Can you still generate significant SEO gains from a sub domain if you were forced to use it providing the primary (e.g. yourcompany.com) had a lot of link clout/authority? Meaning, if I had to go the sub domain route would it be the end of the world?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Does duplicate content on a sub-domain affect the rankings of root domain?
We recently moved a community website that we own to our main domain. It now lives on our website as a sub-domain. This new sub-domain has a lot of duplicate page titles. We are going to clean it up but it's huge project. (We had tried to clean it even before migrating the community website) I am wondering if this duplicate content on the new sub-domain could be hurting rankings of our root domain? How does Google treat it? From SEO best practices, I know duplicate content within site is always bad. How severe is it given the fact that it is present on a different sub-domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Amjath0