SEO people.. Does having a non .com domain affect your rankings?
 

Anyone know?
If you have a non .com domain (or even a .net domain) do your rankings get affected?

if you have a proper content, represented within a proper code and thats what surfers expect... who cares if its .com or .net if they get it?

You did notice he was asking about SEO and not surfers in general.

Depends on who you talk to. Doubt a .net would have a negative effect, however, a .info or .org should probably be an information or organization site.

In other words, pta.org would probably rank over pta.com unless both owned by the pta and they are just forwarding .org to .com

Simple answer: .com, .net, .org and .info worked always fine for me, the rest doesn't do as well. That's for less competitive terms and there is no pattern which of the above endings is perferred by google, domain name and ending get the more irrelevant the more competitors are optimizing for a certain searchterm.

One exception: Country specific domains like co.uk can rank pretty well in the main index but often only get top positions in the country specific index...e.g. even if the language used is english, a .se will never beat a non country specific domain with similar inbound linkpower and content quality in the main index.

baddog is on point. it's mostly a matter of semantics. .com's came out first so everyone associates that with better quality but that isn't true for the spiders

i can give you the real answer, but i can also tell you a simple way to find out for under $20 :)

buy www.somedomainname.com and www.somedomainname.net and put identical pages up . link to them from the same page using same text and then wait and see who ranks higher..

p.s. simple answer is no , but this changes and the way to check from time to time is simple and cheap

doesn't affect the rankings, might affect surfer ctr.

The only reason why .infos get a tad extra scrutiny at times is they were wicked cheap for a long time and were used as throw away domains for splogs/comment spam & other naughty tricks... If you put real content on a .info and reg it for more than a year or 3 it should be fine. The rest of the tlds should really not matter. Baddog brought up a good point though, depends on the market and search phrase -- if the query is best suited for a .org or .edu response those will likely out weigh .coms at times.


PS: "It depends"

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while.

I've found that my non-.com domains do especially well on Yahoo, even my funky extensions like .in and .md are getting very high rankings for my target keywords.

it really doesn't matter in my personal experience, but you'll get a different opinion from everyone on this topic.

If you were informed a little bit about how google works(and probably other SEs), it will penalize you for duplicate content so that is a stupid way to compare.

get spendy and blow 30 bucks on 2 domains & a throw away virtual and not worry about it ... I think most people 'get' the dupe issue but good idea to bring it up for those that don't

:pimp

thats me mr uninformed se guy :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

try reading what i wrote ...:2 cents:

well the point of the demonstration/test is to spend $20 to test if theres a difference not to use the domains for something..

ill give you an example..

if you put a word that cant be found on google like ghhjdsgfu8e7rtiuy on a blank page on 2 brand new domains and link to them from the same post/page google will show both domain when you search for that keyword. one will be higher. if google spiders them at the same time it iosnt going to know whats duplicate and whats not. and even if it did they both would get the same penalty

regardless of results the argument is a moot point , the differnce in googles mind of .net and .com ( the question of the thread ) would be so insignifigant it wouldnt matter

Smokey: my question is: how can you be sure that test is really conclusive?

There's a lot of other factors like domain name age... if you're looking not at this test but results in general...

From what I have read on SEO forums, it really doesn't matter.

:2 cents:

the question wasnt about other factors the question was only if .net was better than .com or vice versa . my test would be the only test that would come close to proving one or the other.. BRAND new domain with zero backlinks no other text to interfere

any other test involves exactly the problems you mention , domain age etc.. many many other factors


but you do kind of have a point with duplicate content , as nobody really knows how they figure that in.. if i copy a yahoo article and it gets spidered by google faster than the yahoo article , will yahoo get penalized ?

ill slightly alter the test to bypass this

pick two domains brand new one.com one .net same name. put one word that cant be found on google on both pages , then add a different word that also cant be found on google on each page , then get them spidered at the same time , this way both pages will have different content by 50% but will both rank for the same term :) :thumbsup

http://www.6dicksunder.com/hh/stg.jpg


^^^ 4 months old site on info domain, that's last months stats + over 44 000 direct hits to the site (also thanks to google), many more SE hits to many more info sites (well, nearly not enough if you ask me but still....)

and I'm not even seo people

Same goes for a squirrels wife...

yup, that's true. it's not what's after the dot, it's the content

it doesn't matter...