By Scott Endsley Wednesday, November 16, 2011
For an upfront fee of $185,000 plus a $25,000 annual fee, anybody can own almost any TLD he/she requests. eBay can own .ebay, Dell can own .dell, .computers or .laptops, and Pepsi can own .pepsi and/or .soda, .softdrinks. The TLD possibilities are endless.
The high price tag is designed to prevent spammers from abusing these new opportunities, and the application process will attempt to help brands avoid having their names fall into the wrong hands. If companies haven’t already started thinking about what this means to them, it’s time to start.
Brands need to think about how to best leverage the endless amount of possibilities. For example, is there an opportunity to offer a service with a branded TLD? — will eBay want to offer customers a custom TLD at myonlinestore.ebay?
Is it necessary to secure your .brand simply to protect it? Will ecommerce sites be able to reclassify how product categories look and are managed — laptops.mycomputerstore, mice.mycomputerstore, software.mycomputerstore, etc.?
Many factors will affect how companies make these decisions, including the impact on search engine optimization (SEO), which is the focus of this report. What are the possible implications of custom TLDs on SEO?
Search engines won’t be indexing the new custom TLDs for several months — perhaps a year. The speculation about the impact has been swirling for months. Certainly one of the factors to consider is the impact on SEO.
With more than 200 factors influencing the results of any given search, the impact on search rankings of any single factor is minimal. The algorithms used by search engines are unlikely to change specifically to account for new TLDs but the flexibility of how to use a custom TLD could influence the well-known factor of keywords in the domain and/or URL. Ultimately, the most important factors in ranking high in search engines will remain the same and be equally difficult to truly define and completely understand. At a very high level, we recommend following one key rule: Have great content focused on the right keywords with a huge number of inbound links.
There are several potential influences on SEO from a variety of elements.
• Impact on brand
Branded TLDs will likely be the first widespread utilization of the new domains. Ranking well in organic search for branded searches takes minimal SEO effort, so the fact that content at .dell, for example, would likely rank well for branded searches doesn’t add much new value because branded searches already show dell.com at the top of search rankings.
• Keywords in URLs
Perhaps the biggest influence on SEO will be the ability to have keywords not only in your domain, but as your domain. For example, computers.dell, laptops.dell, but generic TLDs will have options as well — for example, dell.computers, cheap.computers, laptops.onsale, etc. The possibilities are endless. Of course the price and process will be a barrier to this becoming a common situation, but it is possible in theory. Keywords in your URL and your domain do seem to have a positive influence on search rankings when they match the search term. However, with the new TLDs making this easier to create, the impact may decrease over time, especially if spammers attempt to manipulate this strategy in a negative way.
• Increased presence on page 1
Recent changes in how search engines display results have given more real estate to websites that the engines recognize as highly targeted to a query. Having control over content that fills out remaining search results on page 1 is a challenging strategy and coveted result for brands. Currently brands can work to achieve rankings with videos, Twitter, Facebook, micro sites, sub-domains and local results. Having a branded or even generic TLD could be another opportunity to gain a spot on page 1 of search results.
• Improved click-through rates
A keyword-rich URL can help users understand that a page they are about to visit will meet their needs. Having the ability to set up URLs with keywords can strengthen this even further. For example, a search for laptops with a search result URL of laptop.dell could have higher click-through rates in organic search.
• Potential disaster in moving current site
Much of the speculation about the potential impact of new custom TLDs is at best educated guesses at this point. One factor that must be considered is the very real impact of fully committing to a custom TLD for a website and moving from a well-established .com site to an .anything site. A website with strong rankings, driving significant organic traffic, that converts well is a valuable commodity. Making the decision to move a site with this strength to a new .clevername or even .brandname domain could be very costly. Even with the resources, time and effort needed behind an exhaustive 301 redirect plan, a change of this magnitude may compromise the authority of a site and see a decrease in rankings, traffic and revenue. It will be vitally important to consider all factors before making any move, but perhaps more important are the steps that need to be taken when the decision is made and the plan put in place.
In the long run, only time will tell how new, custom-branded and generic TLDs will affect the search landscape. There is no doubt that positive and negative implications exist that should be considered as they relate to search engine optimization of a website. At the very least, brands should put a custom TLD plan in place and determine the best practice for their organization. If you have additional questions about TLDs or SEO, please feel free to contact Scott at sendsly@vml.com.
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