Let me save you some time. If you don’t have $185,000 burning a hole in your pocket, this article does not concern you. If you do, or are simply curious then the move by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to dramatically increase the number of domain endings may be of some use and, at the very least, will make a great party piece conversation topic.
So here are some facts. There are currently just 22 Top-Level Domain (TLD) endings and 250 country-specific ones (the ones which end in .co.uk or .com.au). Until now the fact that there are so few TLDs has meant that from a webmaster point of view having a .com or a .co.uk domain name was important because it helped the website visitor identify the seriousness and relevance of the website they visited.
Looking to buy cupcakes online, for example, would not work so well if I went for a website based in the US (a .com one, usually) while I live in the UK. On the web, of course, there should be little difference and there is no hard-and-fast rule of course, it all comes down to online visitor perception and informal practices but the convention was widespread enough and influenced online consumer behaviour sufficiently for it to really make a difference.
When I was deciding on domain names for HelpMySEO I decided on a .com rather than a .co.uk domain name because the audience I was targeting was global as opposed to local. So this change in TLDs proposed by ICANN can be crucial. Suddenly I could have HelpMy.SEO registered as a TLD provided I am willing to part with the aforementioned $185,000.
The current domain name system has led to cyber-squatting (the practice of buying a desirable domain name and sitting on it until someone wants it badly enough to give you some cash for it) and registering of company or near-company names in the hope of some cash. The new system will have stringent controls and checks designed to stamp out the practice plus, the asking price for setting it up produces a barrier all of its own to the quick-profit motive.
Although there will be some uptake by large companies and those who have set up a clever marketing campaign and want to draw attention to it, it will have no impact on SEO whatsoever. SEO is driven by two complementary factors: what search engines do (and see) and what online visitors see (and do). The convention of .com and local TLDs has been around sufficiently long enough to make it transparent. Just like we do not bother mentioning www. in front of a web address any more (we say instead HelpMySEO.com) we also do not consider .com, or .com.au, or co.uk to be a barrier to remembering a website’s name.
This means that in terms of online visitor behaviour one of the new TLDs is unlikely to give you much of an advantage and, if anything as the case of social bookmarking site Delicious proves, it is likely to be a hindrance. Delicious, cleverly made use of the .us suffix to create the domain name del.icio.us driving webmasters to despair (myself included) as we tried to remember whether it was deli.cio.us (a natural enough division of letters) or delicio.us (also natural) or their choice of del.icio.us. In the end the company gave up and also registered and redirected delicious.com saving us hundreds of manhours in the year spent looking for the bookmark leading to their site.
The lesson is an important one. With online visitor behaviour largely unaffected by the new top level domain names, search engines will not do anything different in terms of how they see them and treat them, either. This means that in terms of SEO, if you do have a new TLD you still need to do all the clever SEO stuff detailed in SEO Help if you really want to get somewhere. So, your competitors, if they spend that much, will have no advantage whatsoever (the TLD review procedure pretty much excludes the obvious strategy of using it to create a high-traffic URL based purely on keywords) and, should they spend that much on their domain name, they will now have less to spend on their SEO and online marketing.
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I’ve led the discussion on how social media and SEO are changing the processes we use to work and live, online, with the publication of my book ‘The Social Media Mind’. I combine experience in journalism and blue-chip corporate management with a penchant for explaining complex issues in simple terms. Contact me for media interviews, presentations and panel discussions
