Are .clinic domains effective?

[webignite]

We acquired a .clinic domain for a client, they are right now running under a .ca and I was just wondering if there were any cons to making the switch. On the flip side are there any pros?

I've tried to search for the answer but couldn't seem to come across anything, thank you if you have any knowledge or could point me to a resource.

[john4math]

(This is all speculation as I've never done this before.  There are probably people in the forum that have)

Be aware you're switching from a ccTLD to a gTLD.  Is the clinic primarily for Canadian residents?  In the simplest terms, switching from a .ca to a .clinic may hurt your Canadian rankings, and help your rankings everywhere else.  If you want your site to continue targeting Canadians specifically, you can set that in your Google Webmaster Tools, although I think having the .ca domain itself is a stronger indicator to Google that your site is geared towards Canadians.

[webignite]

Thanks, that was helpful

[rflores]

Here is a good article about htat topic

http://moz.com/ugc/an-seos-guide-to-acquiring-new-gtlds

You might try searching for gtlds on Google too.

This is what Matt Cutts had to say

"Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings."

Here is an additional article about it:

https://www.tsohost.com/blog/how-do-new-gtlds-affect-seo

*edited for additional link