New Domain Extensions

[Nicole Sims]

I have a question maybe it has been asked before.....I was looking for a domain for a blog idea that I have, and of course the .com was not available but many other extensions were...

Do these extensions matter? Are you less popular or do worse in SEO if it isn't a .com but instead it is a .net , .guru , or .reviews

Just curious! Because such a good choice of domains at reasonable prices seem to good to be true.

Thanks in advance!

Nicole

[chris_rp]

It matters somewhat as a ranking factor. It's one of those aspects that's a bit like hosting in that while you can rank with any of the above mentioned domains, if you and your competitor have everything neck and neck but they have a .com and you a .review, Google might put them above you.

.net is the most common of the ones you've named and you should have no problem ranking a .net if your on-site and off-site is done right. There are a lot of sites that have .net. It seems to me it used to be more popular back in the day but you still see big .net sites about that do really well, and as far as I'm concerned it's an extension I generally trust when browsing.

Here's the catch, or here's why I would be hesitant to go that route (at least for a .guru or .review), it will probably affect your click through rate. You may be able to rank these websites but the typical person searching for something is going to click a .com (assuming you're in the States?) domain because of the trust factor.

So you could be number 1 and number 2 for a keyword, but you'll find a lot of people will click the third result if they're .com. I've read studies that indicate this is even more the case if you're trying to rank a british website - people prefer .co.uk.

I'd imagine it would be a bit similar to what you used to get with .info domains, not impossible to rank by any means but people generally associated them with low quality.

I imagine most people with .review websites for example are affiliate marketers. I don't like being sold to so I would steer clear of them and be dubious about the impartiality of a .review site for the most part.

I also personally don't like longer domains like .review because they take up too much url space in my opinion. That's just a preference on my part.

I like to see the full url path of a site in search results. If a url is shortened to .extension/.../pagename/ it's harder to be 100% on what the page is about. For example the category that's been skipped could be /videos/ and maybe I'm looking for text? It could be a guide, it could be a news article, it could be a download. I like to see the full url path as well as the title and description. Some people don't care about that and do very well from websites while ignoring that aspect as irrelevant. Probably just me being a picky b*stard

With all that said, even if it does matter to some small degree, you will find examples of websites ranking with these type of extensions all across the internet, so they can't matter that much. In fact I bet there's loads of people on here who rank websites that go against everything I just said

But as a best practice I would go for the extension of the country you want to rank in, or .com or .net for international sites. I'd go for the .net if I was you.

[-Shay-]

The more options after the "dot", the less traditional EMD's are important (from my experience). I've grabbed up a variety of extensions and as long as the extension doesn't look "dot-spammy", people do not tend to notice and will click if it is what they're looking for.

[sampendleton]

In SEO purposes domain extensions doesn't matter as per matt cutts. Though, for user preference it does. If .com is not available then .net will do since both are TLD.

[DanHorvat]

.net will do since both are TLD.

Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs)

.aero
.biz
.cat
.com
.coop
.edu
.gov
.info
.int
.jobs
.mil
.mobi
.museum
.name
.net
.org
.pro
.tel
.travel