information Google: How We Handle New gTLD's

[enlytend]

Google published a post on their Webmaster Central blog explaining in detail how they treat the new gTLD's.

The important takeaways are that:

1. They reiterated that NO gtld - including .com, .org - gets preferential treatment.
2. Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
   
3. Even if they are location-specific, they will be treated as gTLD's , NOT like CCTLD's. If you have a location preference, you need to set that.
   
4. Punycode version of a hostname is being considered equivalent to the unencoded version. No separate canonicalization or redirect is necessary.

Read the Webmaster Central blog post
Summary at SearchEngineLand

 

[LucidDomains]

That is a significant blow to the new extensions. I know many people were hoping G would give them some relevence on search. It may still happen but I guess not right now.

Just based on the domain itself - if you have finance.money you're fine but if you have something like flower.money, your domain is more likely to come up in search for vegetation than anything finance related. If you have something like my.money, even though that's a killer domain, as far as organic search goes, you get no points.

The playing field is still level and in my opinion, .com will remain king for at least some time yet. It does have 20 odd years of branding behind it as the internet's main extension. That will be hard to topple.

 

[ulterios]

Google published a post on their Webmaster Central blog explaining in detail how they treat the new gTLD's.

The important takeaways are that:

1. They reiterated that NO gtld - including .com, .org - gets preferential treatment.
2. Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
   
3. Even if they are location-specific, they will be treated as gTLD's , NOT like CCTLD's. If you have a location preference, you need to set that.
   
4. Punycode version of a hostname is being considered equivalent to the unencoded version. No separate canonicalization or redirect is necessary.

Read the Webmaster Central blog post
Summary at SearchEngineLand

I had told several people over the last couple of months the same thing and they thought I was completely wrong!

Especially #1.

Some people were Reg'n some and paying higher reg & willing to pay higher renewal fees BC they thought they got the pref treatment.

Thanks for the info., now I can refer those to this nice bit of inside info.!

 

[enlytend]

Just based on the domain itself - if you have finance.money you're fine but if you have something like flower.money, your domain is more likely to come up in search for vegetation than anything finance related. If you have something like my.money, even though that's a killer domain, as far as organic search goes, you get no points.

You get nothing "special" for those last 2 domains as far as financial rankings, but these days keywords in domains don't pack the same punch they did back around, say, 2010. My.money could be a memorable brand to build a business around, and there are plenty of ways to rank a site none of which rely on an EMD or PMD.

But agree that .com's still have a huge advantage from a public mindshare perspective. That can affect rankings indirectly by affecting click-through rate from search, whenever the URL is visible.

(Given a choice,people tend to gravitate towards the familiar.)