Four to five years ago, you would have seen that there were not many choices when it came to domain name extensions. The most popular options were.com,.Net, or.Org extensions. Well, that is not the case now. In the recent times, a lot of domain name registry companies seem to have expanded this list mainly owing to the growing demands.
It is important to understand its effects prior to investing in a top new domain extension. You should know whether or not it can impact your SEO in a negative way.
Of course, the general idea is using.com,.org or.net is ideal to rank on search engines. Moreover, numerous SEOs have pointed out that making use of new domain name extensions appears to be a bad idea as you take the risk of damaging your rankings on search engines.
Well, there aren’t many cases to perhaps support the statement that a new domain name extension is a bad idea. There is one person – Daniel Nigeria who is the CEO of.xyz, a domain registry operator, who has expressed in a case study that there is perhaps inaccuracy in the negative hype about using the new domain extensions.
Let us have a look at what Negari found in his case study:
The main objective of Negari was to indeed to prove that a new extension, such as. car extension can also rank like a top level domain such as.com. What he did was he worked together with Lucra Cars (automobile manufacturer, Southern California) and replaced their website’s old domain with the new domain, i.e., Lucra.com with Lucra.cars. All the Lucra.com URLs were then redirected to this new domain; also, he kept the website structure intact so as to eliminate several other factors which might affect the search engine results page of Lucra.
While the domain initially lost its search rankings, subsequently it rebound back and the company regained its number one ranking with the new domain name Lycra. cars. The conclusion of Negari’s case study made it obvious that a new domain name extension does not harm SEO.
What are the limitations of this case study?
While Negari’s case study does show that it is pretty possible for a site to rank on top with a new domain extension, there happens to be a few limitations with this case study:
- The findings appear to be merely anecdotal and are not scientific. To draw definite conclusions, a large sample size is required.
- The case study was based on a popular brand name instead of a generic keyword.
- The findings of Negari show that it is possible for brand names to rank high even when they have new domain extensions.
Google algorithm might change so as to reflect the new domain extensions
Well, even if the current algorithm of Google penalizes domains using such new domain extensions, there are chances for Google to change its algorithm anytime in the future. A lot of specialists are of the opinion that search engine users eventually prefer much shorter & more relevant domains wherein Google might change its algorithm in order to meet the user preferences.
While the jury on whether new domain extensions will impact SEO or not is still out, it look like the anticipated negative impact is perhaps lower than predicted.
