Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
NEw domain extensions, are they worth it seo wise?
-
Hello I am curious if all of these new extensions for domains are worth it?
So say you are a home builder and you bought homebuilder.construction - where as construction is a new extension, does this help seo? Or is it all just a big sales gimmick?
Thank you for your thoughts
-
Hey Dr. Pete,
Sorry for the late reply.
I will see you in July. I just did SerchLove Boston and immediately after that purchased tickets for SerchLove San Diego in September.
The ROI on going to those events is fantastic and they are awesome to attend.
I have to wait have to purchase my MozCon tickets on Wednesday because might have a second person coming with me.
I will see you in Seattle at MozCon.
All the best,
Thomas
-
Unfortunately, no - still pretty limited on travel - if I take a trip, it's usually to the Moz office. Speaking at MozCon in July and then in the Czech Republic in November.
-
Hi Dr Pete,
Thank you for the list of universal TLDs they are getting more popular every day.
Will you be at search love San Diego?
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Google has been non-committal on this, other than to say the new TLDs won't get any special preference (which is a bit vague). We don't really know yet if those domain keywords will provide SEO benefit. I think most of these will be treated generically, and the keyword in the domain may carry limited benefits.
Personally, if you have a choice between a lousy domain on a traditional extension and a really memorable domain on a new extension, I might lean toward the new extension. I'm talking about homebuilder.construction vs. great-homebuilder-construction-company.org or something like that.
There's the usability aspect, too - I think it's going to take people a while to adjust. If you owned chicago.attorney, people might pick up on that, but they're still used to thinking in terms of .com, etc. There's going to be an adjustment period.
If the price is right and there's a good one out there, it may be worth buying, but I don't think there's going to be much of a gold rush on these new domains.
-
Thomas is generally correct here, although Google has since begun treating .co as a "generic" TLD, which is to say they no longer geo-locate it to Colombia. See this reference:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en
So, the Colombia association won't hurt, but it won't be geographically connected to Colorado, either. There is some chance that you could pick up the "Co" on a keyword match, if someone searched "Denver, Co" and you owned "denver.co", for example. That's speculation on my part, though. I certainly wouldn't count on any benefit.
-
HI Berner,
thank you for the kind words.
I agree with Jimmy on what he said about .net & .org
remember there are many powerful .net's .org's out there for instance SEOmoz.org was the old URL for Moz.com sum of the best marketing companies in the world like distilled.net uses .net
it really comes down to the website itself being better but why would think about is how many phones have .com built-in to the handset. If you are giving someone your URL and you tell them the name they are going to assume most likely that it is .com and less you had to constantly correct them which would not help in the long run because one day you and be there to remind them.
however if you cannot get the .com for your brand I would strongly recommend either looking for a new name depending on how attached or powerful name is or using a.net/.org
Remember if you are going to go up against a existing website with a .com you have the possibility of serious competition in order to rank for your own name. You should always audit the company containing the domain with .com you wish you use the exact same domain name except for the TLD watch out for trademarks as well.
My best advice is taken a look at all the places where you can purchase a domain if you cannot find the one that you want. You can most likely find it on places like https://flippa.com/ , http://www.namejet.com/ & https://www.sedo.com/us/home/getting-started/ to name a very few.
Definitely do a back link check and run them through http://www.removeem.com/ just to be certain that they have not been hit by a penalty. Which unfortunately if the domain is not new would be passed on to you. Some more information.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Jimmy,
just so you are aware.co originally was Columbia and still is the country code for Columbia Neustar the second largest domain registrar to VeriSign purchased .co to use as an abbreviation for company it was simply a collaboration between the Columbia and Neustar
Here is Matt Cutts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k0sCnzzVtNs
SEO & .co
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.co
"Neustar has always been a partner with .CO Internet, providing registry services and infrastructure support for .co extensions, the top-level domain assigned to Colombia."
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/21/4009212/miami-tech-company-co-internet.html
Just wanted to make sure that you knew and actually was a country based TLD and they went for the money.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
.com is the best by far, followed by .net and .org... I would get the .com if possible and if not, get the .net or .org... I wouldn't write them off.
-
You are correct in regards to the .co not helping rank for Colorado. However .co is not for the country Columbia and made to work for everyone. The .co extension is for company names and branding your name. It is a global extension. .co = company
-
So last question I promise
As a rule of thumb, although .com is king, would you shy away from a .org? or .net?
Or basically its .com or nothing type of thing?
-
Great read, thank you for the suggestion
-
No .co will not help you rank in the state of CO
its Columba but was made to work for everyone.
Hope that helps,
tom
-
Read this as well
-
ok thank you.
On a weird note if I may ask.
I live in Colorado. many times people use the words CO to represent a city, like Colorado Springs, CO
Would a domain like example.co be worth it if the search engine look at CO possibly as a abbreviation for Colorado?
Or is this just stupid to think that way?
Thank you
-
The TLD you use can be worth money as far as SEO I would take .com homebuilder.com over a homebuilder.construction every day.
the power to point a .com .net .org at the country of your choice is a big SEO plus
if you can get the .com it is still #1 in the US at least.
Tom
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
-
Using a Reverse Proxy and 301 redirect to appear Sub Domain as Sub Directory - what are the SEO Risks?
We’re in process to move WordPress blog URLs from subdomains to sub-directory. We aren’t moving blog physically, but using reverse proxy and 301 redirection to do this. Blog subdomain URL is https://blog.example.com/ and destination sub-directory URL is https://www.example.com/blog/ Our main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL site. This is on Windows server. Due to technical reasons, we can’t physically move our WordPress blog to the main website. Following is our Technical Setup Setup a reverse proxy at https://www.example.com/blog/ pointing to https://blog.example.com/ Use a 301 redirection from https://blog.example.com/ to https://www.example.com/blog/ with an exception if a traffic is coming from main WWW domain then it won’t redirect. Thus, we can eliminate infinite loop. Change all absolute URLs to relative URLs on blog Change the sitemap URL from https://blog.example.com/sitemap.xml to https://www.example.com/blog/sitemap.xml and update all URLs mentioned within the sitemap. SEO Risk Evaluation We have individual GA Tracking ID and individual Google Search Console Properties for main website and blog. We will not merge them. Keep them separate as they are. Keeping this in mind, I am evaluating SEO Risks factors Right now when we receive traffic from main website to blog (or vice versa) then it is considered as referral traffic and new cookies are set for Google Analytics. What’s going to happen when its on the same domain? Which type of settings change should I do in Blog’s Google Search Console? (A). Do I need to request “Change of Address” in the Blog’s search console property? (B). Should I re-submit the sitemap? Do I need to re-submit the blog sitemap from the https://www.example.com/ Google Search Console Property? Main website is e-commerce marketplace which is YMYL website, and blog is all about content. So does that impact SEO? Will this dilute SEO link juice or impact on the main website ranking because following are the key SEO Metrices. (A). Main website’s Avg Session Duration is about 10 minutes and bounce rate is around 30% (B). Blog’s Avg Session Duration is 33 seconds and bounce rate is over 92%
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joshibhargav_200 -
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
Hello good people of the MOZ community, I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall. Some examples of the **old **URLS would be https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirin44355
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine. The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live. Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing? I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage. Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski0 -
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Domain Forwarding - SEO Impacts?
I have a site that has been active for years - thinkbiglearnsmart.com. Awhile ago I had purchased about 50 domain names that were relevant to my company. I still have those urls and would like to use them to point to different pages on my site - just because they have good key words in the URLs. For example - one is dreamweavertrainingclassesonlinelive.com. Currently they are all redirecting to my homepage. A. is that hurting me? B. I would like to redirect to the more relevant page. ie the page dedicated to Dreamweaver training (http://thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver-creative-cloud-training-course/ ) Will this hurt my Dreamweaver keyword for example because there is already a 301 redirect on that page from a very old Dreamweaver link which was something like thinkbiglearnsmart.com/dreamweaver C. On my hosting account where I can select where the URL forwards to - it has an option for "Location forwarding" and "Frame forwarding" - currently they are set to Frame forwarding - which one is best? Any help is much appreciated!!! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webbmason0 -
Redirect ruined domain to new domain without passing link juice
A new client has a domain which has been hammered by bad links, updates etc and it's basically on its arse because of previous SEO guys. They have various domains for their business (brand.com, brand.co.uk) and want to use a fresh domain and take it from there. Their current domain is brand.com (the ruined one). They're not bothered about the rankings for brand.com but they want to redirect brand.com to brand.co.uk so that previous clients can find them easily. Would a 302 redirect work for this? I don't want to set up a 301 redirect as I don't want any of the crappy links pointing across. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jasonwdexter0 -
SEO value in multiple backlinks from same domain and from various sub-domains.
A site has a link to my site as one of their main tabs, which means whenever a user clicks through to another page within the site, my link - being a main tab - is there. This creates thousands of links from this site. How does Google treat this? Do we have a rough formula estimate. In other words, assume it creates 1,000 backlinks would the SEO value be around the same as if I had just 2 link total as a main tab, but on 2 different non-related sites? Or, does it actually count fully as 1,000 links? Links from various sub-domains. Several .EDU's are linking to my site. Different schools within the overall same university. Example: nursing.abc.edu links to my site, but so does business.abc.edu. For SEO does that count as much as if I had links from complete non-related universities, or would Google evaluate that these links are related (since same main domain) and that will discount any links more than 1 to some extent? If discounted, then what do we estimate the discount to be? thank yoyu
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knielsen1 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
www.sierratradingpost.com We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results. The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites. Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site. What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues? Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=62d0a16c4702a17d&hl=en&fid=62d0a16c4702a17d00049b67b51500a6 Thank You, sincerely, Stephan Woo Cude SEO Specialist [email protected]
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | STPseo0