Will New Domains Be The Key To Rankings Success?
A modern day gold rush is upon us. Web masters all across the globe are grabbing their metaphorical pans and their ultra trendy hats ready to sieve through the big chunk of shiny new domain name extensions which will begin to go on general sale to the public in just a few days time. They will be released in staggered blocks stretching into March and will include things such as .bike, .clothing, .singles, .kitchen, .sexy, .tattoo, .company and .computer to name but a few. It’s safe to say these domains cover a wide range of topics and will certainly make for some interesting and cool domains in the future, but just how useful will they be for your website, and are all of these people waiting to battle it out like these names are the last item in a Black Friday sale justified, or barking up the wrong tree?
There has been plenty of rumours over the months since the news of new domain extensions broke about what this could mean for SEO, and forums, blogs and social networks have been buzzing with rumours over the effect this new release could have on the entire system of rankings that Google uses to determine just how important your website is in its world.
Taking a step back from the madness though, it does seem that these domains are highly unlikely to all of a sudden revolutionise the way that websites are ranked and how successful they are, in fact SEO guru and head of web spam at Google Matt Cutts has said that these new top level domains (TLD’s) will not hold any advantage over existing domains – at least for the time being. Indeed exact match keyword domains are nowhere near as effective in SEO as they once were, so it seems highly unlikely that simply by having a new domain name to match your primary keyword will give you direct success.
Of course this is not to say do not go out and buy a new domain for your company if the chance arises, for example you may want to snap up a new domain for your business for trademarking purposes, and the right domain extension may help to further implant your online brand into the brain of customers and searchers alike. However, at least for the time being, be sensible, buy what you need or may want in the future, but don’t go out and spend all of your money capturing 400 different domain extensions for every keyword under the sun, hoping to first dominate Google and then the world, because the truth is, you’re unlikely to be seeing a big return on your investment any time particularly soon!
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I think people need to stop buying domains for SEO purposes anyway and TLDs have never really had an affect on rankings (although with my tinhat on, theres evidence otherwise) But regardless of that, imagine the branding possibilities for domain such as bike.pedal? baby.clothes or mens.clothes?
bike.pedal sells bike pedals. mens.clothes sells mens clothes. So for big brands, it can be a massive coupe to grab something along those lines.
On the flip side, though, how many average web users will see “type bike.pedal” and actually go to bike.pedal.co.uk?
Understandably the keyword searches are reduced in importance by Google, but other search engines operate different algorithms – I have seen keyword rich domains work very well on Bing, again this may change to the same end.
My two cents.