.Co Domains - Any thoughts?
-
Hi Guys
I'm not sure which section this one belongs in as I didn't see a section for domains/tlds.
I wanted an opinion on the future of .co domains. We own a gift company (www.xperiencedays.com), as well as a gift recommendation site (www.uniquegifts.net), and invested in a few gift occasion .co domains (www.birthdaygifts.co, christmasgifts.co etc). This was partly because they were cheap and easy to come by, but also with a hope that they soon gain some public recognition.
My question therefore is whether anyone within SEOMOZ has an opinion on whether .co will be widely accepted, whether they will (as google claims) be treated as a non-country specific url, and early success stories you know of, and finally whether the recent news from Overstock to rebrand as O.co (http://www.overstock.com/guides/faqs-about-o-co) is the kick start that .co need. I realize that is more than one question
-
This is the exact reason why I am hesitant to purchase and run with .CO domains. I would rather exercise all of my options to make a .com work rather than running with a .CO.
-
I, personally, am not a huge fan of .co domains from a branding perspective. I believe it easily confuses prospective clients with .com domains.
-
Just to add my four bob to this thread. We recently had the case of a client wanting to use the .co version of his business name as opposed to his .com.au. The .com belonging to a competitor. His re designed website was launched under the .co domain and the feedback from his clients and colleagues who he emailed using the .co email address was that the .co looked suspicious and spammy, as an email address firstly, and the web address was seen as something that did not resonate well with the local and international market.
I think the .co domain will take some time to be accepted for regional search engines such as Australia until the domain name becomes more readily accepted into mainstream website development and more commonplace.
-
And vice versa though? Could you end up with more traffic mistaking you for your larger competitor?
-
.co is the ccTLD for Colombia. It was packaged up by Godaddy as a TLD for 'Companies' 'Communities' 'Corporations' and other things that it doesn't represent. Buying a .co ccTLD and trying to rank in Google.com is like buying a .au ccTLD and trying to rank in .Google.com. If I had the choice between .info and .co I would go with .co for branding reasons and .info for SEO reasons. Why for SEO? Because I've seen and worked with companies that have acheived with .info but yet to do so with .co. Search "William Shakespeare" for example and look at the .info outranking the .edu's.
If I want to rank globally I'd have to pick gTLD over ccTLD but I definitely feel like I'm going against the grain here! Who's with me!?
-
I think that that is a great idea buying a .co where a competitor has the .com but i have also has to buy the .co for my company just so that no one else can do this to me. When these were first released it seem to tak an age for google to see them and rank them high but i think that now they have been around for a while google seems to be ranking them higher, although I am yet to see a .co overtake a .com in google's rankings which is annoying as they are quite expensive compared to .com or .co.uk etc but you just have to buy them so competitors cant use them againsed you.
My advice would be to buy it just encase becuase you would be very annoyed if a competitor bought it and overtook you in the rankings.
-
I agree with you on buing a .co when a competitor owns the .com.
But I think in time the .co will gain value as the public becomes less fixated with the .com's. But having a .com will always be preferred. Like having a 800 number vs a 888, 877, or 866 number. If I had to put them in order.
-
Just to add that I would personally be scared of having domainname.co if I know my competitor has domainname.com - too easy to spell it wrong and send free traffic the wrong way.
-
Casey gave a great answer, but just to add another point...
Even if they don't get public recognition in terms of appealing to customers and becoming mainstream, generic names like www.birthdaygifts.co have considerable value to domainers and affiliates, so they are definitely worth holding on to even if you don't develop them.
-
Hi,
I definitely believe Google that these won't be treated as country-specific domains, and if I were offered a keyword.co versus a keyword.info domain, I'd most certainly go with the .co. I think that it will resonate with people due to being similar to what they're used to seeing. This, of course, has nothing to do with a technical advantage: we'd like to believe that a TLD doesn't mean much from the perspective of a search engine, although you do see .com keyword-rich domains ranking better than other TLDs with the same keyword, in a lot of cases. Again, you don't want to confuse cause and effect: does the .com really help, or are .com domains usually owned by people who put up better websites? Hard to say.
When big companies use a TLD, that certainly lends some credit to it, and I think the domains you've bought are good. I don't think you've wasted your money, especially if they were quite cheap!
I wouldn't spend too much time or money buying every .co. domain under the sun, but I do think they're a better investment than many other TLDs. I don't have any stories of big successes yet, and I'd go as far as to say that the TLD is a bit too new to know what its fate will be. I do, however, doubt it will become as highly spammed and disregarded as the much-maligned .info and .biz.
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
-
Domain has been redirected our site; but many incoming links from sub domain. Will this hurts?
Hi all, This is the scenario: Our website is newwebsite.com. Our old website is oldwebsite.com which has been redirected to newwebsite.com (years back). But one of the old website's sub domain has a lot of back links to our current website like: seo.oldwebsite.com to newwebsite.com. Will this scenario hurts with any wrong linking? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Do the referring domains matter a lot in back-links? Google's stand?
Hi, It's a known fact about quality of back-links than quantity. Still domains are heavily different from links. Multiple domains are huge comparing to multiple links. Taking an average, how much does 'number of referring domains" boost website authority? I am not speaking about low quality domains, just number of domains including which are irrelevant to the topic or industry. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Directories and Domain Authority
I read all the time about how directories have very little weight in SEO anymore, but in my field, a lot of our competitors are propped up by paying for "profiles" aka links from places like martindale-hubbard, superlawyers, findlaw, nolo, Avvo, etc (which are essentially directories IMO) yet all those sites have very high DAs of 80 and above. So, are links from these sites worth it? I know that's a vague questions, but if Moz's algo seems to rank them so highly, I'm guessing that's reasonably close to what google thinks as well...maybe? Thanks for any insight, Ruben
Algorithm Updates | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Complete website redesign: original domain vs subdomain vs new domain ?
Hello dear community fellas!
Algorithm Updates | | PayPro
The story goes like this: my company has a good ol' website launched back in 2008 and since then nothing much was updated there. Our rank dropped significantly because, well, barely any SEO was done for it. Me and my team decided to redesign the whole thing: content, structure, visuals, links, everything but this time really making it right. However, with our oldie we managed to get a nice user base, so we still want to get all the traffic juice out of it. Now the questions is where do you think is the best place to publish our new website: Our original domain www.companyname.com? Create a subdomain new.companyname.com? Totally new domain www.namecompany.com? Cheers!0 -
301'ing away from an exact match domain.
Hi Moz Community! My website gets just over 50% of its traffic from ranking in the top 3 in over 10 countries for my exact match keyword domain. 80% + from keywords related to the exact match domain. We are now looking at doing a to 301 re-direct to a new domain to start a fresh branding to the site to increase scope and expand. This would involve removing the keyword from the homepage and domain entirely . However. Considering all competitors ranking for our main keyword, have the keyword in their domain as either a subdomain to or in their root domain and in their homepage content, would this make ranking without the keyword in domain & content hard? I have found a very similar example that has done so, so I guess the answer to that question is no its not. about 65-70% of our anchor text on our backlinks is for our domain keyword. Can anyone advise how best to go about maintaining rankings after 301ing or how best to go about 301ing to make sure that we can maintain the rankings for our main keyword! Any advise at all would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | howiex10 -
Merging Multiple Domains into a Single Domain and Its Effect on Ranking
My client had multiple top-level-domains. Each one represented an insurance program within a specific vertical. For all the sites at these alternate domains, there was a 30/70 mix of duplicate vs. original content. Some of the alternate domains ranked very well for their target keyphrase groups, where others were absent in results pages. We advised the client to merge multiple domains into their existing main domain, for usability and SEO reasons. We recently ran the merger. Here was our process: On the main domain, transfer the content such that it matches 1-for-1 content on the various alternate domains Setup Google Webmaster tools on the main domain Push the new content on the main domain live and submit a corresponding sitemap to Google Establish 301 redirects on the alternate domains, such that each alternate domain URL points to its respective page on the main domain We did this 12 days ago, and pages (previously on the alternate domains) that had ranked well on Google have now plummeted or are entirely non-existent. Did we do the right thing by merging multiple top-level domains into a single domain? Is this initial dip in rankings normal? How soon should we expect to see it return to its normal rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | PinckneyHugoGroup0 -
How can we start to improve Domain MozRank & MozTrust for our website?
A simple question maybe, but how and where do we start if we want to improve our 'Domain MozRank & Moztrust', 'assuming of course that by improving both these we will improve our rankings with Google plus sales?
Algorithm Updates | | ewanTHH0 -
Google.co.uk vs pages from the UK - anyone noticed any changes?
We've started to notice some changes in the rankings of Google UK and Google pages from the UK. Pages from the UK have always typically ranked higher, however it seems like these are slipping, and Google UK pages (pages from the web) are climbing. We've noticed a similar thing happening in the Bing/Yahoo algorithm as well. Just wondered if anyone else has anyone else noticed this? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | Digirank0