The .com TLD has long been recommended for creating new websites. The idea is that, it is somehow favored by the search engines and as such, it gets a ranking boost over the others by the algorithm.
SIA tested various other TLDs in another test some months back, however, Hunter wanted to test the three most popular TLDs to see how they compare.
Test Downloads
Transcription below:
Clint: Okay, this one is from Hunter. The idea behind this test is we did a test for Bill in one of his presentations, I believe, it was a big domainers conference that we did the test form for, where we tested the various tlds and how they stack up and which ones you should buy and which ones they indexed.
In his particular test, the purpose of that was to check for indexing. And here, we wanted to test the big three to see if Google had any preference for it. So the way it was set up is 1000 keywords for each page, 3 pages on each domain (.com, .net and.org), and it's 9 pages in total. And this is kind of how they set up after indexing started kicking in. And they were doing pretty much consistent .com, .net and.org).
As you can see, they went in that way .net.com.org. And stay that way throughout the course of the test net.org. So based off of this test, there's a couple things that we kind of figure out. No, I'm just gonna leave it here is one, for this particular keyword, the .net one, right,? and then the .com and .org. But when you look at the search results, .com is kind of the winner.
For the most part, depending on the keyword type in the market area. Like for software in SAS diet io seems to be so take this test is kind of a grain of salt. And when you're buying a domains for a new brand, or partial match, or exact match for any product launch, or whatever, by the .net and the .com, set up a test page and see which one of them for your term Google prefers. And you may find that, as in this case, you see that the .net actually indexed a lot better, and index first and then an over.com.
You may find that there's just a preference, it's called the ranking random domain factor that Google has for that .net that you bought versus the .com. So this is more of a idea that you should be paying attention to the variations in your domains and not just the you know, I'm gonna stick with the .com again.
Also, keep in mind that users kind of stuck on .com, right, so and they have a little bit more trust with .coms. They accept that .nets now they're becoming more prevalent. And then some of those other tlds are just kind of like fancy. So keep that in mind your selections in how to get around this random. Dory, I want to ask you, if you see this and when you're doing PBNs, and you're let's say you're building a network, do you find or do you like stick with .coms? or you go with the other ones?
Dori: I go with anything that has high trust flow? I don't care what it is.
Clint: That makes sense.
Dori: But you know, now once I see this, if I'm going to do an affiliate site, I'm going to get the .net. You know, because I'll test it. One time I did actually test the Big 4, actually, it was the .net .com .org and .info for an ASM product launch that we were trying to rank for. And the .org was the first one, it was totally, this was 5-6 years ago, it hit totally beat out the rest. So that's the domain that we used.
It is a good idea to buy the top 4, do a test and see which one rises to the top. Especially if you're doing product launch, affiliates, stuff like that. But for branding because of that trust, I probably still always stick with the .com if you can get it.
Clint: Yeah, I would probably go with the .com too. But I'll never shy away from a .net. As a matter of fact, you can do a lot if you're looking around and you're shopping for domains long enough you'll find that the .coms are registered as premiums AL 2, 3, 5, 10, $20,000 and then the .net, 10 bucks. So why not get that .net right?
Dori: Yeah seriously
Clint: Especially if Google's going to be ranking indexing its just fine. And the indexing thing. The test that we did with Bill, I went back. I want to say 6 months later, and the .nets were all still there. They didn't drop out from that test. So in a lot of the other TLDs did that's kind of putting those two together that you shouldn't be ignoring .net at all.