.org versus .com
-
I work at a non-profit that has always used the .org URL for any sites they create. I am designing a site right now with a heavy weight on SEO as part of the strategy and I have both the .org and .com versions of the URL. Am I right in thinking that I should use the .com?
-
Hi Jimmy,
I do not have any hard data to refute what you are experiencing; however, I will share it is highly likely the spike is related to other factors and the TLD being .org or .com is completely unrelated. It would be an exceptionally major change for Google to change how they value TLDs. Such a change would be front page news on all the SEO sites.
-
I have read the two previous answers in the Forum about this subject but Google has seemed to have again changed the playing surface. Within the past 30 days, we have seen a huge spike in organic search returns seeming to favor .org as domain authorities.
Has anyone else noticed this shift and is it just coincidence or worth factoring in?
If it is a shift, will Google punish those that have .org but have used.com previously for switching the redirects to serve .org first?
-
Ryan is right. .org's have a sense of trust in the nonprofit community. From experience people would rather donate money to a .org than a .com . I'd build on the .org and 301 the .com to it.
-
There is absolutely no SEO ranking difference on using a .org vs a .com. You can use a .info and it would not matter.
The difference comes in with public perception. Many people view .org sites as non-profits and .com sites as more commercial. That's not a bad thing since that was the original purpose of those TLDs. I think you should always grab the .com URL when possible, and then forward it to the .org. This method ensures you get all the traffic from those who go to the .com site, but you also keep the .org to display the perception of being a non-profit.
There are not any hard rules here. It is up to your judgment. You can disagree with me and use the .com site. In that case you would forward all the traffic from the .org to the .com for the same reason as described above. Your rankings wont be affected, but it is a component of how users view your site.
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
-
How does Google rank a "Site:yourexamplesite.com" Query
Hi All, Sorry for the potentially confusing title. I am trying to find out how google ranks the pages of your site when you search "site:yourwebsite.com". When I did this with my website I was surprised what pages showed up on the first page, there were sub-category pages in the top 5 results and top level category pages that weren't on the first page. I have been unable to find information as to how google returns these results, is it the same algorithm/factors that make pages rank highly in a regular search, or does it have something to do with how recently google crawled these pages. Any feedback would be helpful. Additionally, if anyone has worked through a similar scenario I would be interested to know if there were any insights you gained from finding out which of your pages google returned first. Thanks for the help! Jason
Web Design | | Jason-Reid0 -
Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host?
Is there a way to host my website.com/BLOG URL PATH from a different host than my main website.com host? Is it accomplish-able with DNS settings or are there other considerations that might lead to complications doing this? Specifically, we are investigating install WordPress on a dedicated host, JUST to power the blog for our main website, but our main website is on an internal proprietary hosting and CMS. So basically we're trying to host: website.com --> OFF OF CURRENT INTERNAL HOSTING website.com/blog/ --> OFF OF THIRD PARTY HOSTING (USING WORDPRESS) I know this is a technical question beyond the scope of SEO, but I'm figuring there are members of the community that may have tried this already so I'm floating it here. Many thanks! Cheers.
Web Design | | AlexVelazquez0 -
What are the downsides and/or challenges to putting page paths (www.example.com/pagepath) on a different server?
Hi, Our company is organized into three different segments and our development team recently needed to switch a portion of the business to subdomain because they wanted to move to a different server platform. We are now seeing the impact of moving this segment of the business to a subdomain on the main domain. SEO is hurting and our MOZ score has dropped significantly. One fix they are debating is moving everything back to one domain, but place segments of the business on different page paths and hosting specific paths on different servers. I.e. the main domain could be www.example.com hosted in one location and then www.example.com/segment1 would be hosted on a different server. They are hoping to accomplish this using some sort of proxy/caching redirection solution. The goal of this change would be to recapture our domain strength. Is this something that is a good option or no? If not, what are the challenges and issues you see arising from doing something like that as I don't know of any other site set up like this. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | bradgreene0 -
Does blogger.com stink for SEO purposes?
Three different SEO guys suggest moving my blog to another platform. " I think migrating to a more robust CMS platform like Drupal or Wordpress would be a wise decision." But, they never say why moving would benefit SEO. My blog is on a custom domain, has lots of original content and has decent organic traffic to begin with. I think I have other SEO issues to deal with before bothering with a new platform. Does blogger stink for SEO? Why?
Web Design | | Eric_haney0 -
Rich snippets tool/ schemer.org update?
We have a domain in the netherlands that shows stars (rich snippets) in adwords and in the organic search results. As we do the the in rich snippets test tool we see some errors as shown in the attachments, the errors are shown in review aggregate - but stars are stil shown in paid and organic search. Do we need to follow-up these errors? Do they influence ranking - or the stars in the near future? Z0fCKRW
Web Design | | remkoallertz1 -
Do I need to 301 redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com/ ?
So, interestingly enough, the Moz crawler picked up my index.html file (homepage) and reported duplicate content, of course. But, Google hasn't seemed to index the www.domain.com/index.html version of my homepage, just the www.domain.com version. However, it looks like I do have links going specifically to www.domain.com/index.html and I want to make sure those are getting counted towards my overall domain strength. Is it necessary to 301 redirect in the scenario described above?
Web Design | | Small_Business_SEO0 -
Trying a completely new design on our .co.uk should I have it on a different IP to my .com
We have just relaunched http://www.gobananas.co.uk/ and made the site much smaller than .com and dissallowed robots on 98% of the site. The goal with this site is to get users to use the search facility rather than go through our menus like we have on .com Should I host the UK site on a different IP number to the .com?Thanks
Web Design | | PottyScotty0 -
How to verify http://bizdetox.com for google webmaster tools
Hey guys i tried to to make a Preferred Domain choice in webmaster tools, but it is not allowing me to save my choice bec its asking me to verify that i own http://bizdetox.com How do i go about doing that and what are the steps I have already verified www.bizdetox.com
Web Design | | BizDetox0