.net or .co ?
-
The .com owner of the desired domain refuses to sell the domain (even though it is essentially a parked site and has been for the past 5+ years). Currently, our site resides on .net. I hear that many associate .net domains with dated and too techy. What is better? A .net or a .co?
-
I totally get where you're coming from. The squatter situation is extremely frustrating to be sure and isn't getting better any time soon. If you can't make a trademark claim, it will be extremely difficult to get someone to sell who has no interest in selling.
With regards to settling, I hear what you're saying. I just personally feel that the .net is too big of an issue to overcome. Whether we like it or not, people have been trained to throw a .com after everything. If they see a mention of your brand, they'll likely assume the website will be located at [yourbrandname].com. If you are using a domain with a .net and someone else has the .com, expect to see quite a bit of your traffic go to the .com.
Think about all the names of companies and brands that are complete nonsense words (or extremely obscure words). Grabbing a URL that is keyword focused will potentially help you with SEO, but it is often extremely difficult to build a long term brand around. Also, keep in mind that keyword rich URLs may help in the short term for SEO purposes, but they can be extremely limiting if the company wants to expand beyond the keywords. Even Moz had to go through this, changing from SEOMoz.org to Moz.com (as the old name limited the brand to being solely focused on SEO).
Hope this helps!
Mike
-
Thank you for your input, Michael. In your opinion, when will it not be "settling?" With the continuously growing number of sites in addition to the number of squatters, don't you think we will, as users, eventually have to accept non-.com TLDs? As a user I'd rather go to bestthing.net than thisisthenextbestthing.com (extreme example, but hopefully you see what I'm saying).
-
I'd go .net personally. Been around longer, more trusted and you won't be sending as much confused/fatfinger traffic to the guy who has the .com as you would if you went with .co (for obvious reasons).
That said, your best option is to come up with a new name for a domain that is either currently available or is available for sale at a reasonable price. There's no reason to settle for a .net or .co (and you are settling) when there are plenty of viable .com options. There are countless examples of companies being highly successful with completely made up names. It isn't about the name. It's about what you put behind the name from a branding perspective.
-
I like your style Ryan! Excellent add-vice
-
You could focus group the two and see which people prefer. Or you could buy several and test their performance via Adwords split testing before taking the plunge of transferring or creating the new site. Really this boils down to not what has possibly worked for others, but what works best for you.
-
Hey TLR711!!
Oh man that's unfortunate that he is just sitting on it like that. But what can you do?
I would go with the .net as it is a TLD.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can we use Youtube Videos of google webmaster on blog post?
Is it okay to embed YouTube videos of channel which we don't own? For example, I have written a blog on enabling event search in Google Analytics and Google Webmasters YouTube channel has a video based on those steps. I am looking to add that video in my blog.
Branding | | Ravi_Rana0 -
Does a site with only one blog post a month rank alright?
I manage multiple websites and want to start new ones but want to know if one blog post a month is acceptable for SEO since I'm worried about rank.
Branding | | hssm20191 -
B2B Blogger Outreach
Hi I'm working on an SEO campaign in relation to vacuum cleaners. I'm working on some outreach and as we focus on B2B I'm finding it difficult to find blogs which are B2B focused. We would ideally want customers who are buying a number of vacuums for their business - but it could be any industry. Instead of B2B blogs, I have gone with the angle of cleaning/organising blogs, with lots of followers on social. However, does anyone know of any good B2B blogs they could recommend? I'm looking for something written by facilities/buildings managers - if blogs like this exist 🙂 Thank you
Branding | | BeckyKey0 -
Rate My Logo!
Hey guys, Can't for the life of me decide which color pallet to use for this logo, so please let me know your thoughts! The logo is for a website that specialises in Instagram social media marketing - So without further ado... Green, Blue or Blue with Red Heart? Thoughts, feedback and anything else you want to add! DBFnY
Branding | | camille10 -
Moving .com to .co.uk without compromising .com
Hey guys, I have spent a little time searching for a suitable solution, but I feel like maybe directly asking my specific question is the best way to go about this: We have a site www.mywebsite.com and it serves all UK customers (right now, the site is useless for US customers). We would like to move those customers to www.mywebsite.co.uk and carry all the google points we have accrued with it but unfortunately, I feel like a 301 redirect would cause a big issue because in January, we want to launch a new site which will have very similar if not the same urls but the content will target our new US customers. I don't want to end up in a position where our customers end up with redirect loops or where we end up confusing customers. For now, our solution is this: make our site available on both .com and .co.uk canonical tags on both sites will be set to the UK version of the site. if the user enters the homepage on .com, we show a page saying: "hey, we are launching a US site soon, click here to read more and sign up, or click here to go to the UK site." - this page will not have a UK canonical tag because it has no equivalent on the UK site. If the user clicks on the "goto uk site" button, they have acknowledged that we have 2 sites now and we can 302 redirect them to the equivalent .co.uk page every time they go to .com until we get .com live (powered by a cookie). -- we hope that bots won't be affected by this. It would be good to know if it will affect bots or have any negative SEO side effects. at this point, we have 2 types of users, informed and uninformed users. Informed if they clicked the button described above. if the user enters any other page on .com, we don't redirect uninformed users, we just let them use the site as normal because we don't know if 302 redirects will cause issues for our ranking. if the user enters any other page on .com, we redirect informed users to the .co.uk site... this includes the .com homepage If the user goes to .co.uk, the site is normal. No special landing pages, no redirects, no extra cookies. We want to start changing external .com links to .co.uk and new content we write about our site will start going to .co.uk When .com goes live, we will remove the redirects and people using .com will start seeing US content instead of UK content. People using co.uk will be unaffected. Hopefully, google is directing most of our customers to .co.uk by now. Ideally, we want to transfer our google ranking from .com to .co.uk since it is technically a move, but I need to be sure there will be no side effects from using 301 redirects when we put the US site live... Both SEO wise and UX wise. Anyways, does anyone see any potential problems with our current plan? are 302's problematic for our SEO goals (moving .com points to .co.uk)? will changing canonical from .com to .co.uk have positive or negative effects? Can we safely apply 301's and is it necessary... esp. considering the short timeline (releasing US in Janurary). Are there any extra steps we can take to maximise our efforts and/or speed up the site transfer. Is it a bad idea to allow .com to serve the same content as .co.uk except the homepage? Any gotchas you can think of? Thanks in advance, Dipun
Branding | | dipunm0 -
Am I better off buying a .com with a stopword or a .net / .org without?
I'm trying to decide between three domains:
Branding | | Andrew_Mac
mydomain.com
domain.net
domain.org What's the latest word on if there is an actual SEO impact to the stopword or whether it is just ignored entirely? Further, does anyone have any insight into whether any of these domains are seen as more credible (from a searcher's standpoint)? Thanks so much!0 -
1 Website, 2 Business Names, 2 Locations
I took on a dentist office as an SEO client. They have 1 website, 2 business names and 2 locations. Each location has it's own business name. They are both within the same city as well. I'm not exactly sure where to start with them since they have 2 different business names. If it were 1 name with multiple locations I would just create a Contact Us page for each one, but is that the best thing to do when the location names are different? Should I create a different website for each location or is that smart because then they are competing against each other? Any help from the community on the direction I should take would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | SilhouetteBS0 -
.NET VS .COM VS Keyword Density in the URL, What do you suggest?
I am about to launch an eCom project for a new company. The client has three URL's available. I recognize keyword density is slowly becoming less and less of a factor, but still has significant relevance. I haven't had much experience working on .NET URL's and would like to know anything related to the effects of .NET url's vs. .COM url's. Also, just what you would go with and why? Option 1 "EXACTMATCHKEYWORD.net" (17 total characters) Option 2 "MOSTLYMATCHINGKEYWORDcompany.com" (21 total characters, with company) Option 3 "ABEXACTMATCHKEYWORD.com" -AB represents the company's initials/logo. (19 total characters) USEFUL POINTS 1. 95% of purchases will be one time purchases (so I'm not focused as much on company branding as usual). 2. The company name is actually "exact matching keyword Company" 3. We will be targeting 100's of terms, but the "exact match keyword" represents 1/4 of total search volumes and thus is extremely important.
Branding | | mgordon0