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What is the weight of .pro domains? Will they rank?
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.pro Domains have ben out there for a while but seem to as late started to be adopted. Thoughts and opinions welcome.
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IMO these are essentially novelty domains, maybe good for billboards or traditional advertising mediums but not for SEO, .co seems to be the only one getting a little traction.
I purchased Brisbane.pro (the name of my city) a few years back as an investment as I thought our company Brisbane Consulting might use it for recruitment or as a collaboration and information share tool. So far it's not been utilised.
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If you become a huge success on bozzie311.pro you can expect a very large percentage of your hopeful visitors to type in bozzie311.com.
If you are serious about your venture and going to charge out with intentions of winning then my recommendation is to find a great .com. Lots of domains are not being used right now or being underused. Paying $1000 or $10,000 or even more for a great address is worth every penny IMO.
Although there might be 100,000 of these domains registered, most people will say "huh???" when you tell them your web address by phone. Most will forget and type in .com.
I have not gotten to the ranking question and this is a 'no go' for me. However, I think that a .pro will be just as easy or difficult to rank as any other type of domain.
The upside might be fewer robots trying to scrape your content and spam your blog.
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Bozzie311
They are tld's with no more or less "weight" than any other. Yes, they are used by professionals to some degree, but they won't outrank a .com of Dr. Jones or vice versa on the tld alone.
There are currently over 100K registered .pro domains. Most (about half) in US - all from Wikipedia.As with any of the tld's, it will or won't rank based on other factors.
We handle various professional practices and we have zero .pro domains simply because most had a domain prior to engagement.
Best,
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