Automotive Marketing

This is link week at the official Google Webmaster blog. Their most recent post, shortly after 11:00 PM PDT, reinforced their top-level domain preference against newer and cheaper options. Specifically, one of their graphics uses a .biz domain to represent the “spammy” site.

The reason for this is because .biz and similar new extensions like .info are cheaper to buy than more traditional top-level domains. These extensions have not been around as long, and obtaining a high quality name of short length is less difficult than securing its .com counterpart. Earlier this year, there was even a time when Google “accidentally” removed all .info domains from its search index.

Spammers are more likely to purchase the cheapest domains to infest, and .biz and .info names are on sale more often than .com and .org names. Search engines like Google derive a quality signal from these facts. The result is that a new .biz is more likely to be a fly by night site than a .com, and receives less trust from the algorithms.

Moral of the story

• If your goal is to launch a website to rank well in search engines, the pay-level search engines can derive from your website matters
• Older domains that are renewed year after year avoid this low quality signal altogether
• Branching out on new domains to create a network of similar sites that rank is more difficult on cheaper top-level domains