SEOMoz advice on only buying domain if .com version is available
-
RE: "In order to maximize the direct traffic to a domain, it is advised that webmasters should only buy a domain if the .com version is available. "
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain
- I am working for a client who's had a domain live for 5 years or so without a .com version of the domain (just .co.uk) - the domain is also hyphenated (which doesn't look like a great idea).
So, just wondering what research has been done into probs caused by lack of .com domain and by using hyphenated domain. I'm trying to figure out whether it would be worth advising client to switch to a new domain.
Your thoughts would be welcome
-
Thanks guys, much appreciated and very useful. I just found Rand's whiteboard on domains and found it quite useful too - see 3:Â http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name
and this on hyphenated domains:Â http://www.highposition.com/blog/hyphenated-domains-google/Â -Â but it's hard to know. Might set up some of my own tests.
-
It literally depends upon many things! Like if you client’s target market is within UK then I would recommend you to stick up to .co.uk domain as this way you will be able to get better visibility in Google UK plus visitors who are directly coming to your website will tend to trust you!
In my opinion single hyphen is fine if it fits the brand name as well but if you have a domain available that contain no hyphen and at the same time if you can afford a bit of a dip in traffic then you cna go for the new domain and redirect 301 the older domain to the new one but if you are not ready for the traffic and ranking dip then it won’t be a good idea!
Just my 2 cents!
-
I agree with the guys above, it less to do with seo (if any) and more about human error.
I used to help with a uk gaming website that had a lot of american visitors, and I notice over the years people (the old time) would link to "sitename".com instead of .co.uk, which was held by a domain shark, so lost back links.
But I think this is because of an American audience used to everything being .com
Note: ultimately we bought the .com off the domain shark, I contacted him and originally he wanted $1000s for the domain, I said $300 would be the most I would page for it and said good bye. 2 month later he came back to me and sold it for $300. So if you have a domain shark with the .com play the long game with them.
-
I don't think that is is much of an SEO problem as long as you are targeting business in the UK.
We have lots of high ranking .co.uk sites that are unaffected by the .com alternative. We have American suppliers of products who own the .com addresses and therefore we are not in direct competition.
The only time that it could be a problem is if you are physically competing the the .com version and they sell the same product and are targeting the same keywords as you.
Your potential customers may end up buying from the wrong company.
So in my opinion this is a branding issue rather than a Search Engine ranking issue.
-
It really depends which markets your client is trying to target. If their target market is UK only then the .co.uk is perfectly fine. If the .com is available then it would do no harm to purchase it to save a competitor getting hold of it and outranking for the domain/brand name. You could simply redirect the .com to your .co.uk site.
Alternatively if the target is wider than the UK then it becomes increasingly difficult (though not impossible) to rank with a .co.uk in other countries. Hope this helps.
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
-
Need Advice - Google Still Not Ranking
Hi Team - I really need some expert level advice on an issue I'm seeing with our site in Google. Here's the current status. We launched our website and app on the last week of November in 2014 (soft launch): http://goo.gl/Wnrqrq When we launched we were not showing up for any targeted keywords, long tailed included, even the title of our site in quotes. We ranked for our name only, and even that wasn't #1. Over time we were able to build up some rankings, although they were very low (120 - 140). Yesterday, we're back to not ranking for any keywords. Here's the history: While developing our app, and before I took over the site, the developer used a thin affiliate site to gather data and run a beta app over the course of 1 - 2 years. Upon taking on the site and moving to launch the new website/app I discovered what had been run under the domain. Since than the old site has been completely removed and rebuild, with all associated urls (.uk, .net, etc...) and subdomains shutdown. I've allowed all the old spammy pages (thousands of them to 404). We've disavowed the old domains (.net, .uk that were sending a ton of links to this), along with some links that seemed a little spammy that were pointing to our domain. There are no manual actions or messaged in Google Webmaster Tools. The new website uses (SSL) https for the entire site, it scores a 98 / 100 for a mobile usability (we beat our competitors on Google's PageSpeed Tool), it has been moved to a business level hosting service, 301's are correctly setup, added terms and conditions, have all our social profiles linked, linked WMT/Analytics/YouTube, started some Adwords, use rel="canonical", all the SEO 101 stuff ++. When I run the page through the moz tool for a specific keyword we score an A. When I did a crawl test everything came back looking good. We also pass using other tools. Google WMT, shows no html issues. We rank well on Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. However, for some reason Google will not rank the site, and since there is no manual action I have no course of action to submit a reconsideration request. From an advanced stance, should we bail on this domain, and move to the .co domain (that we own, but hasn't been used before)? If we 301 this domain over, since all our marketing is pointed to .com will this issue follow us? I see a lot of conflicting information on algorithmic issues following domains. Some say they do, some say they don't, some say they do since a lot of times people don't fix the issue. However, this is a brand new site, and we're following all of Google's rules. I suspect there is an algorithmic penalty (action) against the domain because of the old thin affiliate site that was used for the beta and data gathering app. Are we stuck till Google does an update? What's the deal with moving us up, than removing again? Thoughts, suggestions??? I purposely, did a short url to leave out the company name, please respect that, since I don't want our issues to popup on a web search. 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | get4it0 -
Are Google algos different between .co.uk and .com?
I have a site that is starting to rank well (top 10 to top 50) for dozens of keywords in Google.co.uk but very little traction in .com. Google.com is the primary market. Webmaster tools is set to US, less than 1% of links to the site are the UK TLD or hosted in the UK. Keywords I'm ranking for in UK are medium to high competition with up to 16k exact search volume per month in the US. I just started to get ranked for these keywords in .co.uk in the past week, and I do rank for some long tail keywords in google.com. I have a handful of keywords ranking in google.ca and google.fr as well, but next to nothing for google.com. I have been building links for one month. I can think of a few possible explanations: - There is a delay in updating the rankings for Google.com and the rankings similar to my .co.uk rankings will come soon - Google.com vs .co.uk use a different algorithm - My site is penalized in .com only Of course, there is no way to be sure what the reason is, but what do you think is the most likely? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | kentaro-2569290 -
Page rank of 2 with zero SEO and a 2 month old domain?
Hello, I helped work on a website for a friend.  We used wordpress, a theme from elegant themes and wrote the content over 4 days.  Zero back links, no seo, etc.  Well, a little on page optimization and that's about it.  Oh, we did ONE back link from a review site. The domain was brand new; never registered before. About a week after it started getting indexed, it jump from no page rank to a page rank of 1.  About a week later, it jumped to a page rank of 2. Again, zero seo (aside from above stated). The site is: trade lines review dot com A page rank of 2 is nothing to write home about, but given the circumstances, how is this even possible? Thanks you!
Algorithm Updates | | Friedman0 -
Any PR Lose? Google Made a Update ! Heavy Traffic, Followed SEOmoz Tips - Dropped to PR4 ?
I followed the rules to minimize the links in the page. Getting Same Traffic to my blog and increased only. But my PR5 to PR4 ? why even 404 Error was reduced o 5 or 6 which i updated now ! not accepting any Text Link ads !  too past 6 months also !
Algorithm Updates | | Esaky0 -
Blog in Sub Domain or Sub Folder. Pros and Cons
My client wants to show more links on google once someone searches for his company name. Im wondering whats the best way to setup a blog to solve this. Should I create it as blog.website.com.au or website.com.au/blog? What are the pros and cons of each? Thanks heaps guys.
Algorithm Updates | | Uds0 -
Confused About Addon Domains and SEO
I find addon domains really confusing. Everyone I've asked so far says that they don't affect SEO but I find that really hard to believe considering the same content is on both a subdomain and a subfolder and also has it's own unique domain. PLUS (in my case) completely different niche sites are sharing the same hosting. I really don't want to pay for hosting for all of my different sites but at the same time, if it's better/safer to do so for Panda/Penguin reasons I'm happy to do that. Thank you for your time. I look forward to your opinions/suggestions!
Algorithm Updates | | annasusmiles0 -
Was Panda applied at sub-domain or root-domain level?
Does anyone have any case studies or examples of sites where a specific sub-domain was hit by Panda while other sub-domains were fine? What's the general consensus on whether this was applied at the sub-domain or root-domain level? My thinking is that Google already knows broadly whether a "site" is a root-domain (e.g. SEOmoz) or a sub-domain (e.g. tumblr) and that they use this logic when rolling out Panda. I'd love to hear your thoughts and opinions though?
Algorithm Updates | | TomCritchlow1 -
Local SEO url format & structure: ".com/albany-tummy-tuck" vs ".com/tummy-tuck" vs ".com/procedures/tummy-tuck-albany-ny" etc."
We have a relatively new site (re: August '10) for a plastic surgeon who opened his own solo practice after 25+ years with a large group. Our current url structure goes 3 folders deep to arrive at our tummy tuck procedure landing page. The site architecture is solid and each plastic surgery procedure page (e.g. rhinoplasty, liposuction, facelift, etc.) is no more than a couple clicks away. So far, so good - but given all that is known about local seo (which is a very different beast than national seo) quite a bit of on-page/architecture work can still be done to further improve our local rank. So here a a couple big questions facing us at present: First, regarding format, is it a given that using geo keywords within the url indispustibly and dramatically impacts a site's local rank for the better (e.g. the #2 result for "tummy tuck" and its SHENANIGANS level use of "NYC", "Manhattan", "newyorkcity" etc.)? Assuming that it is, would we be better off updating our cosmetic procedure landing page urls to "/albany-tummy-tuck" or "/albany-ny-tummy-tuck" or "/tummy-tuck-albany" etc.? Second, regarding structure, would we be better off locating every procedure page within the root directory (re: "/rhinoplasty-albany-ny/") or within each procedure's proper parent category (re: "/facial-rejuvenation/rhinoplasty-albany-ny/")? From what I've read within the SEOmoz Q&A, adding that parent category (e.g. "/breast-enhancement/breast-lift") is better than having every link in the root (i.e. completely flat). Third, how long before google updates their algorithm so that geo-optimized urls like http://www.kolkermd.com/newyorkplasticsurgeon/tummytucknewyorkcity.htm don't beat other sites who do not optimize so aggressively or local? Fourth, assuming that each cosmetic procedure page will eventually have strong link profiles (via diligent, long term link building efforts), is it possible that geo-targeted urls will negatively impact our ability to rank for regional or less geo-specific searches? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | WDeLuca0