Cheap Domain Names Are Hazardous To Your Website Health
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It’s official, Google’s ranking are affected by the type of top level domain you have. During the final days of May this year, many websites with a special top level domain were delisted from Google’s search results.
Webmasters with sites registered using the super-cheap “.info” extension were rudely awakened to find their sites gone from the index.
A few days later, the websites with the “.info” domains reappeared in Google’s search results.
So what happened?
It looks as if Google updated its filters for special domain names and went a little too far. Earlier this year, the head of Google’s anti-spam team remarked that if you can get a domain for under $4, the result will be another deluge of spammy domain registrations.
Since domain names with a “.info” ending became super-cheap (many available for just 99 cents) it’s likely many new “.info” domains have been purchased for spamming purposes.
Google might have intended to block spammy “.info” domains but a bug in the filter erased them all! Fortunately, Google made things right within days.
What does this mean for your website?
So Google messed up when filtering the “.info” - that’s not the important part to take away from this article. The important part to understand is that…
GOOGLE IS FILTERING BASED ON THE DOMAIN TYPE.
I’ve been saying this for a while stick with conventional domain types: dot-com and the country level TLD’s for example.
*Sidebar* And Rob if you’re reading this, sorry about the bad news, I warned you about registering all those “.infos” ages ago…
Google to launch large scale geo-services
And for those of you thinking your location doesn’t matter - well it does, and Google is paying attention.
“Google is backing up their Location API with a large effort to map out cell-phone towers and wifi hotspots, so that a users location can be pin-pointed more precisely.”
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Interesting post. I’ve always wondered if there was a heirarchy in geographic domains From .jp, .ca, .de to the states (.me comes to mind, along some bad jokes).
BTW, if you’re on the lookout for new domain tools, BrandGopher is a good one.