We all have been watching new domain name TLDs become more visible and more accepted around the world. However, one question which always troubled owners of the standard .com or .net websites is whether the new TLDs will edge out their conventional names and give a preference in Search Engine rankings to the new players? This article deals with why it won’t make a difference which domain name TLD you have registered for your website.
Quality Content
The key to successful search engine rankings is not about which domain name extension you have, but what is the quality of content that you are able to provide your website viewers. The higher the quality of content, the longer each visitor will visit. The longer each visit, it means that you are doing something right. This means that more people will search for your website and this will indicate to search engines that you have the right quality of content.
Simply taking a new TLD and copying information over from a well established website is most likely not going to get you anywhere. Search engines are not stupid to rank your website for stealing someones content and they have elaborate algorithms and ways of determining what is original and whether you have been cheating.
Relevance
More than quality of content it is the relevance of the content for the search engine user, that makes the difference. A new TLD will only allow you to classify your domain name to help people identify it. You may have a conventional name, but have extremely relevant content and it will still be top of the charts. Similarly a new TLD will not fetch you any brownie points if the content is not relevant to a searcher.
Just the domain name does not make the content relevant. What makes it relevant are the keywords that are used to pepper the text and the images which go into the pages.
Google’s John Mueller states that: “Overall, our systems treat new gTLDs like other gTLDs (like .com and .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.”
According to Matt Cutts of Google, there is not extra search engine ranking weight given to a certain domain name or TLD. He said that: “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.”
Although there is quite a hype for purchasing new domain extensions, the long and short of it is that they don’t make a difference, at least for now. Maybe in future, certain search engines may modify their outlook on them and may want to give more weight to relevant names with relevant content. To be on the safer side, you may just want to book your names and keep them in cold storage till you really need them. Else, you can start a blog or parallel website to supplement your existing one.
