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New top-level domains and their SEO gains

In earlier days, almost all website names ended .com, .org or .net. The idea was that com stood for commercial, org for organisation and net for network, but you could pick whichever you preferred.

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Most people kept vaguely to their intended meanings; however, as website hosting grew, the supply of .coms quickly dwindled. ICANN, the regulatory body, added new suffixes to meet demand, especially country codes such as .fr for France and .de for Germany. The UK received co.uk, org.uk and net.uk; now, hosting companies can also offer .uk.

There were still not enough, so ICANN added new keyword suffixes such as .blog, .photos, .bike, .club and .pub. Domain providers such as https://www.names.co.uk/web-hosting often have a search facility on their website so that you see the available domain options.

Most of us still struggle to find one that works with the website name we want, but many also believe the new domain options do worse in search engine results than .com; as a result, many pay large sums to own one. Others believe that .uk or even .bike is just as good.

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Who is right?

Google spokesman John Mueller recently stated that all domain suffixes are treated equally; in other words, you can just as easily rank in Google with .bike as .com. Additionally, even though Google searches your site for keywords, it pays no attention to whether your domain name contains them, so keyword suffixes have no particular SEO value either.

Not the whole story

This might have put an end to expensive domain suffixes, but Mueller also confirmed that country codes are used to help identify the geographical region in which the website’s links should be favoured. This implies it could be a mistake for a British business that sells globally to use .uk. Additionally, some suffixes intended as country codes have been widely adopted for other purposes; for example, many businesses adopt .co if the .com version of their name is taken, but .co is the country code for Columbia. Columbians must get a lot of false leads from Google!

Human nature is the biggest consideration. If someone is looking for your website, they are most likely to try .com and .uk, with .com also feeling more established and trustworthy.

Above all, the most important thing when choosing your website name is that it is memorable.

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