Tuesday, March 20, 2012

How will Google treat new gTLDs?



  1. "There will be a transition period";
  2. "We've always wanted to return the best result we can to users".
Google says nothing and it is acceptable: a transition period is required to adapt to something new. Today, from the 22 existing generic Top-Level Domains, none offers enough precision to be considered as an industry or a specific area of interest and none can be considered as a keyword which truly represents a community or a group.
".museum" maybe? With a potential of 24 000 domains, maybe it is the reason why it does not sell. Too restrictive also which does not help. 

All others Top-Level Domains are no keywords descriptive enough :
  1. .xxx is just 3 x letters one after the other;
  2. .info means "information";
  3. .com means nothing (commercial ? communication ?) but users think .com when it comes to talking about domain names;
  4. .net means...internet, network?
  5. .org means...organization (for-profit? Not for profit?), orgasm ? :-)
  6. .biz means business;
  7. .travel could be a good example but isn't it too wide (and too restrictive)?
  8. ...
It makes it difficult for a search engine like Google to announce a web site about wine will be better indexed with a .WINE extension rather than with a .COM. There is no existing experience about this today but the .museum one.

Will a .WINE web site which deals with wine be better indexed than the same .COM web site?

I would say we already have the answer to this question. When doing a Google search about a museum (I previously searched for a museum which uses a .museum domain name...and there are not a lot of them), the "Penn Museum" (www.penn.museum) for example is found first on top of the Google results, same for the "International Council of African Museums" (www.africom.museum).

It seems to work...in english. And after all, "museum" is an english word.

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