Does TLD affect rankings - Are .info & .com given the same preference in rakings?

[satya]

Many people say .info domains don't rank as good as .com or.net. How true is this? Is there any preference given by Google to the TLDs if you are targeting the international market?

[GFPC]

my take is like this

.com
.org and .net equal
.country extension
.info - dot like them personally.

My route to getting domains is like this

First .com
Second .org
Third .net
Forth .co.uk
fifth i guess .ca LOL

[satya]

Thanks, your answer is reassuring though most people would say TLDs don't matter in rankings.

Why would you prefer .org before .net? Would you put up a gaming site on .org?

[GFPC]

For me personally I feel .org carries more trust. Just my opinion really based on a few results...

I would use .org for gaming sites yes

[graham]

I am pretty sure Matt Cutts said before in his blog or some video that it does not matter, though I still believe TLDs carry more weight, but its possible the effects would be the same on a .info for example.

Here is an interesting article about it: http://www.seomad.com/SEOBlog/do-dif...ffect-seo.html

[davemerry]

My natural instinct would be to side with GPFC in regards to .org's carrying a lot more trust, it is the extension made for organizations and is used by the majority of charities. When I think logically however, they are freely availabe, often cheaper than .com's and there are more around to register - therefore would Google be simple enough just to assume that because someone has brought a .org they deserve to rank higher than .com?

I believe the following in regards to TLD's and ccTLD's when search engines are involved, there are arguments from both sides of course:

• The only TLD's that have preference are those that are official and limited to general public use, things such as .mil, .gov, .edu, .gov.uk, .ac.uk etc. Google denies this to try and stop the spammers attacking these sites - but I feel its a general concensus that they ouze trust and authority as they are very hard to abuse.

• The extension can affect SEO based on your target market. As an example, if you are looking for a site that solely targets the Spanish market you may be better with .es (Spanish extension). Not only will search engines automatically assume your site should rank for Spanish queries, but also Spanish webmasters will be more inclined to link to it consequently ranking higher.

Apart from the above (probably more factors but haven't got time to think!) I can't see why Google would prefer any extension over another.

[Simmo!]

I've experimented with a couple of info's over the past 4 years and the evidence to me seems to support the notion that not all things are created equal.

I noticed that it was easy to rank keyword .info domains for the target term without spaces (surprising how many searchers do that) but harder to rank for the term with proper spacing. Worth adding that neither site had many backlinks so that will probably have an effect in terms of not giving Google any anchor text clues, but still.

I'm also seeing a similar trend with my .co experiment btw.

My .org sites do OK though and while I still think .com and .net are top of the global tree, I quite like what .org achieves.

[best.hands]

SEO is about links and where you get them. It might be that only a few webmasters used .info and ranked them good compared to a massive list of site owners using .com and ranking them good.

There are hundreds of factors you need to satisfy in order to rank a website especially with google. Don't you think using a .info extension and observing all the factors set my SEs won't make it outclass .com? If I am to believe that Matt Cutts is true at what he chatters to the public about ranking factors, he's mentioning over and over that getting relevant links that are natural and dofollow from an authoritative site (a site that has gain reputation through its own quality promotion) is a big backlink quality score that helps rank a site. Now, provided that I can do a lot of these while using .info, wouldn't you think my .info won't outrank a .com with nothing but thousands of non-relevant and poor quality backlinks? Think again.