This is an interesting post from John Mueller, Google Engineer and current public spokesman of all things SEO.
Recently we have all probably seen, heard or even bought one of these new fancy domain names. eg .london .plumber .website .tax .reviews etc etc.
There has been a lot of SEO urban myth been written about the merits and pros and cons of these domains. eg bobplumber.co.uk saw his website traffic quadruple when he moved to bob.plumber and countless other versions of the same story.
But is it true?
Does one of the new domain names hold any advantage over the old ones such as .co.uk or .com?
According to John Mueller from Google, the answer is no.
How will new gTLDs affect search? Is Google changing the search algorithm to favor these TLDs? How important are they really in search?
our systems treat new gTLDs like other gTLDs (like .com & .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
Will a .BRAND TLD be given any more or less weight than a .com?
No. Those TLDs will be treated the same as a other gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.
So as far as Google is concerned, bobtheplumber.co.uk and bob.plumber will be treated completely the same.
But I'm not convinced. Users searching for a plumber maybe drawn to the bob.plumber listing, as it looks and sounds more obvious. If this is the case, then surely part of Googles algorithm will see that the bob.plumber is popular, so reward it with a shove up the rankings?
I guess the only way to know for sure is to test this, and no doubt plenty of people have already started, so I shall be watching SEO sites with interest.
But officially, Google doesn't see any difference or favour any domain over another.
Here's the full Google blog article: Google's handling of new top level domains
What does anyone else think? Anyone got any evidence to argue against it?
