Domains w/ the most 'pull' .com .ca .net .org

[SunnyGosal]

In terms of ranking and/or pull; What domains are considered 'more important' on google search? I once read an article that said .edu domains had a higher credibility than other extensions.

As a Canadian business owner, I want to know if i should register a .ca or other extension? I would imagine most of my customers would be coming from Canada & the US.

Any advice?

[chovy]

.com would be ideal, or .ca if you're interested in localizing.

You could redirect the .com to the .ca

[SunnyGosal]

I found this online @:
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/inte...ng-factors.htm


.gov sites seem to be the highest status
.edu sites seem to be given a high status
.org sites seem to be given a high status
.com sites excel in encompassing all the spam/crud sites, resulting in the need for the highest scrutiny/action by Google.

What are your thoughts on the last statement? .Com sites result in the highest scrutiny/action by google?

[chovy]

That's been the theory for awhile now.

I think .info is a little more difficult than a .org or .net simply because at 99 cents/year registration, they make are a prime target for MFA sites.

I would like to believe .org gets a little more credibility than a .com.

[tharmon]

The fact of the matter is, no matter how much "pull" a certain domain will have with .com, .org, .info, etc, the people who are visiting your site are most likely to go to yoursite.com instead of yoursite.info, and 9 times out of 10, yoursite.com is or will be your direct competition. The general public normally view all websites with a .com perspective. Choose the domain that is likely to give you the most traffic, and the "pull" will follow.

[mcanerin]

It's not about, and never has been about, the TLD. There is no special effect that a TLD will have on anything from a search engines perspective, with one exception, which I'll get into in a moment.

It's about links and neighbourhoods. In general, .gov sites tend to be in better neighbourhoods, so you'll see links from them being more trusted. But the issue is the links and neighbourhood, NOT the TLD.

Likewise, due to the fact that spammers like to buy .info sites, there are a lot of bad neighborhoods there. But it's not about the .info domain itself.

If, tomorrow, all the .gov and .info sites (and their links) traded places, you would see that suddenly it looked like .gov was not trusted, and dotinfo was.

In short, stop looking at TLD's and start looking at links and neighbourhoods. That's what matters. All this .gov/edu, etc crap was thought up by people who are not information retrieval experts, but rather untrained marketers that were looking for easy fixes and rules without understanding why and how search engines work.

Do professionals filter by edu and gov sometimes? Sure. There tend to be a lot of good sites in the edu and gov sphere, and filtering for them can speed up link building. But professionals understand that it's about the site and it's links, not the TLD.

The one exception to all of this is a ccTLD (country code TLD - .ca, .uk, etc). There is no direct rankings benefit or drawback to owning one of these, but there is an indirect effect in that a ccTLD automatically geolocates your website.

This is a good thing if you serve Canadians and your site is a .ca, but a bad thing if you serve people in Los Angeles and have registered a .la domain (you are now geolocated to the country of Laos, and thus can't be geolocated to the US).

One last point - outside of the US, the ccTLD is often of equal or better value, branding and trust-wise, than .com. This is because people hate it when they go to a site, find what they want, and then suddenly discover that the site is US only and doesn't ship to their country. Additionally, since .com is usually cheaper than a ccTLD, it's more likely to be owned by a spammer than a ccTLD.

The days of .com being the default worldwide ended in the early 2000's, and only really exists in the US (the .us domain never really took off).

Don't assume that just because things are done a certain way in your country, that it's the same everywhere else. Currently, the second most popular domain TLD in the world is .cn (China), after .com.

[mcanerin]

One clarification to the above - the TLD has no effect on search engines (other than the ccTLD and geolocation issue I mentioned).

However, there can be an effect on humans. Experienced searchers will usually not just start going down the list of results. They will normally look at all of the results, then choose the most likely one for what they are looking for.

They look at titles, descriptions, and URL's. If your URL inspires trust, you may find that you get more clickthroughs than a higher ranked site that looks less trustworthy, at least for experienced searchers.

In this way, a .gov or ccTLD would often be a human trust factor, where a multi-hyphenated domain in the dotinfo space may not inspire an experienced user to click.

Once again, this is not about rankings - search engines don't care about TLD when ranking a site.

[SunnyGosal]

Thanks for a great explanation Mcanerin.