Is Domain Extension .CO Bad for SEO?
By rockia on May 27, 2010 with Comments 4
The date for general registration open to public, July 20th 2010, is approaching closer and closer. Even though lots and lots of the .CO domains have already been pre-registered through domain registrars like GoDaddy, there are still tons of gems out there that are available for us to pick up. At this moment, I start to question myself, is domain extension .CO bad for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) like some others told me?
What is .CO domain?
You may be able to see lots of urls that contains .co in it, but so far the domains names you see are all second-level domain names that denotes the commercial organizations in many counties. For example, if you are in UK, and the domain for company could be .co.uk .
.CO extension was initially assigned to be the country domain for Columbia, exclusively, but now it is also advertised as an abbreviation for “corporation”, “company” or “commerce”. In other words, .CO was considered to be a replacement of .COM especially for people who couldn’t get satisfying .COM top-level domain names.
The Confusion — Is .CO Bad for SEO?
This is definitely not the first time for me to see this question. When .CC and .CM pushed out, someone asked me the same question; and this time, it’s even more confusing because .CO just a “M” shorter than .COM.
-Typo
Since .CO and .COM is so similar to each other, people might believe they will lose a lot of the traffic due to the typo.
Example:
What if I set up a website, let’s say MySite.CO, and when my visitors try to visit your site, they might type in MySite.COM in the browser by mistake?
-Nature of this domain extension
We know that .COM, .NET and .ORG are the first of few domain extensions that are available to public; therefore there is a saying that Google will weight these domain extensions heavier and thus using these domain extensions especially .COM will have better effect on SEO.
Clear the mist
First, I don’t think the domain name extension will have any cause for the typo. Even if you are using .COM domains, visitors will still have the possibilities to type your domain names wrong. I once told my co-workers about my blog, www.rockia.com, and just 10 minutes after, 2 out of 5 came back to me and told me my site is still under construction. I was confused and they showed me the screen:
HA! That’s not even my blog! They type in rokia.com instead of rockia.com.
The theory is the same for .CO domain extensions. Yes, there will be a tendency that people could type in your domain names wrong but this is inevitable and typo couldn’t be take into consideration of SEO; after all, Google won’t type your domain wrong in the search result, right?
Now, is .COM really better than .CO? According to SEO Web Tips (Firefox reported the site as unsafe, so I am not going to put the link out), the domain extensions has ABSOLUTELY NO effect on SEO.
They are simply categories of Internet domain names. An Sk domain (a country specific TLD for Slovakia) with great content can rank just as high or even higher as a Com domain with the same amount of good content. The same is true for all extensions.
If you just register a new .COM and .CO domains, and set up two identical websites, the crawl rate from spiders of Google, Yahoo, Bing or any other search engines should be the same. In short, domain names are just indexes of a certain space with a certain IP (Name Server), the index itself has no values (to search engines); the only thing that search engines care is the site itself, the content, site structure, update rate and etc..
Post Note:
Even though .CO has no effect on SEO, I still recommend choosing .COM especially for global sites. If you are only targeting a certain area or country, you can use the TLD country domain like .CA for Canada, .CO.UK for England and .US for United States for example, .COM still have better recognition by the internet users. The other concern I have is the price, right now the pre-registeration price for .CO is about $29.99 US/year, while regular .COM price is about $8.99 US/year. I can get 3 .COM domain names with the price for one .CO domain names.
However, if the above is not problems for you, I recommend you to go pre-register your own .CO domain names ASAP before they are gone again just like the .COM domain names.
Filed Under: General
Your right about people always making typos, Rockia. However, one would lose a lot more traffic by choosing .co over .com not because it’s a typo. Rather, the problem is that people have been trained for the last 15 years to type .com and they will continue to do it. Think about those that even have .net domain names. They tell people to go to MySite.net and people go to MySite.com by force of habit. All the Best!
Yea, I kinda agree with you Ed, as I observe more over the last half of a year since .CO got publicize. I guess the habit is driving people, especially the first generations of public internet users, to stay with .COM, but with more and more TLD out in the market and get support from the big corporation, users will adapt to pay attention to the extensions.
As for now, I believe .CO will still be popular in this micro-blog era.
I think this is not 100% obvious. there are many domain extensions which are less popular of use and also less seen in the first page of results on google for many queries.
i wondered for a long time about .co domains and to tell you the truth so far i don’t see any of these rank in google search results. it’s tru that some people might continue buying .com domains but on the other hand .net domains
are not that popular even comparing to .com domains and you can see that there are less .net domains ranked in google search results on the first page of competitive terms.
no one can say for certain now that the extension does not affect the rankings.
No, .co is good domain extension, this is not bad extension for SEO. Google always treat all domain extensions equally. I am using .biz domains for all of my business and I am getting good traffic and revenue. Also, I am using keywords having domains. Some of the best .biz domains are 9.biz, profit.biz, up.biz and email.biz