Today I got a reader question that I thought might make an interesting discussion topic.
I am starting a new blog, and the hardest part so far has been naming it. The domain I like is only available in the .ca format. What is your opinion on using anything other than a .com or a .net? and do you think it will affect blog brand-ability?
I know there are different schools of thought on this question so it should make for an interesting discussion. I won’t sidetrack the discussion with my own opinion at this point but would like to open the floor for some reader comment. What do you think?
- Are .com and .net best?
- When is it OK to not go with them?
- What factors do you consider when picking a domain name?
- What’s more important – SEO or branding – for you?
update: With permission I can now say that this question came from Michael.
I would say always , always stick with .com and .net. I mistakenly purchased a built a site on a .org, as it was the best extension available, and I regret it. I cannot use the site when I leave comments on wordpress blogs – Akismet things .org sites are spam. I imagine the situation won’t be any better for.ca or other such extensions.
Even if the domain is slightly less desireable, go with .com or .net. 100% of the time – you’ll regret it later otherwise.
Yeah, I’d say go with .com or .net and try to keep the domain under or close to ten characters.
Using country-specific domains like .ca is only an option if the blog is focused on visitors from that country.
Don’t quote me on this, but I think you have to live in Canada to use a .ca domain. I remember that http://www.typograpi.ca had to change to http://www.typographi.com because they aren’t based in Canada.
I know that, I mentally rate .com’s higher – don’t know why! I set priority for .com’s when purchasing domains. Maybe it’s because .com’s are easier to remember?
.ca is for Canadian-specific sites generally. Use a .ca and your visitors will think your content is primarily Canadian. That may or may not be good for you, depending on where you think your visitors are from. I think in certain instances a country-specific domain will rank higher for a country-specific search engine (e.g. the Canadian domain of Google.ca).
As for dot-com or dot-net, obviously it dot-com is better because it has been around longer and people assume that domains are dot-com if you don’t specify. Dot-org and others are used sometimes but hardly ever for businesses. I remember that before Six Apart acquired movabletype.com from a family website, it had to use movabletype.org and I kept getting the wrong website (as I’m sure many other people did too).
I like .com’s if you’re going to go for it. I agree with the point that they’re ranked higher than a .ca, at least her where I live. Plus, you can still brand it. For a few sites a domain name is just a name.
.com is king domain – no other extension comes close to it. Why? First off .coms get by far the most type-in traffic. Secondly, when someone visits a site and they try to remember it later, it’s almost ALWAYS the .com they enter in.
As far as .net, I would put it on the same level as .org and very very close to .co.uk (just because of the huge UK presence on the web and htey’re emphasis on the .co.uk domain).
I wrote a bit more about domain extensions in my Domaining 101 series:
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/01/07/domaining-101-extensions/
initially I think: go with .com
I read problogger.NET every day and STILL made the mistake of referencing it as problogger.COM recently…. the .com is powerful
however I do wonder if this site would be as branded if called something other than “problogger”?
Therefore my final answer is: it’s relative to the situation
I think branding is more important than SEO, at least in the planning pahse of your blog. It keeps you focused on your specific difference, on the real value that you will bring with your website.
The branding is the place that you own in somebody’s brain. For instance, problogger.net seems so natural to me, not because it’s on .net, but because it’s a brand, it actually acquired the little spot on my brain that identifies “professional bloggin guidelines and advices”.
And you can also “squeeze” the SEO to follow your brand.
.com is the best, .net is OK, but not as good as .com in my opinion. Anything other than .com or .net is not worth buying.
Just my opinion.
Yeah, don’t go with anything but .com or .net, preferably .com. With most traffic coming from links and SE traffic it’s not as big of a deal as it used to be unless you’re commercial, but having .com is a credibility thing. I respect .coms more than other domains, and I know others do as well.
[…] Darren got my neurons flowing earlier with his latest post on how important .com and .net domains are. Rather than just saying “.com is best” he posed some really thought-provoking questions, and I thought I’d give my personal responses to them here for everyone to read. I’d also like to hear what some of my readers think about them. […]
I wonder whose question that was ;)
This is news to me, I have always put .com first, then .org, then .net.
I was actually about to purchase a .org, but now, maybe I’ll go with .net.
Pretty good summation here so far. For a blog a country-specific TLD may serve well, but remember that it is very limiting. In my tiny blog one of the most interesting aspects is the wide diversity of countries people visit from. I’m an American living in the Philippines. A big issue with Philippine-based bloggers is a .com versus .ph argument. The plus factor would be that the blogger identifies with his/her countrymen and culture. The main negative factor for the rest of the world is the same, the blogger identifies with his/her countrymen and culture. Only you know your own positives/negatives.
I had a long time commercial relationship with a Canadian company. They had a good commercial website with the same name and both the .com and .ca TLD’s. Their actual customer base was about 75% US, 20% Canadian and 5% rest of the Americas (other company divisions handled non-American continent sales). IIRC the IT guy there told me the hits on the .com site were on the order of 10,000 to 1 compared to the .ca “mirror image”.
Last I hope we’ll hear from Darren later in the discussion. I recall that he mentioned here once that when he started ProBlogger he wanted the .com but it was taken so he went with the .net and it has obviously worked well … but I wonder how much better traffic would be if he did have the .com or had started on a different name to have the .com from the beginning.
My advice? .com or nothing.
In my opinion .net is also unworthy. com is the one that makes you look professional
I wouldn’t waste 6 bucks registering a name if I couldn’t get the .com … unless it was problogger.net … which brings us full circle to the power of branding and great content as important keys to creating a successful blog.
The key with domain names is that they need to be easy to spell out if you just hear someone say the name. And the name should be “sticky”. I like to tell a few friends a name I’m thinking about … and then talk to them about the site a week later and see if they remember the name.
.com all the way, although I do have a few .net’s and one .info for testing purposes ;)
I’m using bla.st, a del.icio.us style domain. The other option would have been a longer, multiword .com.
A few months in I wondered if I had made a mistake. Often when I verbally tell people the domain, over the phone for example, they would then type bla.st.com, which of course won’t work. Having to explain your domain is not a good thing.
One of the real problems is I have no idea how many are typing it in wrong. The past week 28% of traffic has been “direct”, so there must be lots who are typing it right.
How much direct type in traffic do other people get?
The advantages outweigh the disadvantages though – once you know how it works, it’s very short and easy to remember. Being quick to type is really great. Google is indexing the site really well. Not using subdomains is important too I think. (more details on my blog http://bla.st/site/blog/63/ )
I’d go with a .com if you’re targeting a non-tech audience, otherwise a tech audience can probably handle something different. The shear lack of good, short .coms means using alternative domains will hopefully become more common and accepted.
PS. I keep typing problogger.com too!
Only .com’s for me…I have 100 or so total sites, with 1 .net and 1 .info because they were such good keywords…
For credibility in business, a general web site needs the company domain. People are leery of doing business with someone with a yahoo.com email address, før example.
Blogs seem to be a different story, though. Lots of very popular blogs have blog-service domains, and it clearly has no effect on their credibility (off the top of my head – Kathy Sierra/Creating Passionate users at http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/ and Seth’s blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/).
I think going non- .com or .net is fine. If people like you, they’re bookmarking your or subscribing to your feed – they don’t need to memorize your url.
Well, it might just depend on what you are doing with it.
I think .net and .com do not have any real differences when it comes to search engine traffic and on-site SEO. I wouldn’t mind going with either if it was really the brand name that I wanted.
Problogger is the perfect example of how content and branding triumphs over domain details. I don’t think it’s really that big a deal but then again it depends on what you plan to do with the domain.
I prefer to use easy to remember domain names instead of keyword infested domains which can get ugly. My blog name (Dosh Dosh) is pretty easy to remember and I get a lot of type-in traffic everyday.
Some SEO experts have also suggested that short domain names load faster. Not sure about that though .. :)
I think it depends on the target of your audience.
If you are going to have a 99% Canadian audience then having the .ca might make more sense.
If you don’t have a target audience in mind then maybe you should determine that before which domain to buy ;)
Go for .edu :)
Stuff like .info and .biz is a death sentence. 98% of everyone else on the TLD is a spammer.
No hyphens in the url as well.
The best bet is to buy a used domain name because then it’s already aged and hopefully already has some search engine juice.
i’m a new reader of problogger.net and a new entrant to the blogging arena, but i’ve been a web developer for a few years, dealing with generally non-tech-savvy customers (mostly small business owners). i had one customer who thought that .com was the only extension he could have (he thought .net, .org, etc. were for specialty sites).
point is, i agree with most of you that .com is the way to go if at all possible because it’s so recognizable to the layperson. as brandon mentioned above with his .net and .info sites, there are always exceptions if you have a great idea (see: del.icio.us). but for the most part, i think folks should stick with .com.
i’m really enjoying the blog, darren. thanks for publishing such great tips!
Going to a foreign website at work (for me anyways) raises some eyebrows in the IT department. I generally avoid domains that aren’t .com or .net.
Where does your audience live?
Hands down, a country specific domain will do better in country specific google organic & news engine searches. But if you don’t mind a few yanks mixed in and are looking purely for traffic… go with a .com.
BTW… with regards to hosting. I have hosted .com.au sites both inside Australian and in the U.S. and have found no difference in ranking.
The .com is the most popular extension, its my instinct to go ctrl+enter when I type a webpage. If you’re making a website and buying a domain, .com is the only way to go. Branding is way more important than SEO. I think not going with .com, hmm.. don’t see a reason to, if the site is taken, you would have to promote your site with a not-so-common extension making it not so interesting.
It’s on people head to respect .com’s better
Agree totally with B. York. Where are your target audience? If you’re likely to attract people from everywhere, then .com is ‘almost’ a must (Darren has got away with a .net and a few others with him).
However, I have a laptop site that is specifically for U.K. people, so I went with .co.uk that time.
.com is of course best if that’s available – but it depends on what kind of a site/blog you’re going to set up.
If you want your site to reach a huge audience and you’re going to spend some money advertising your domain it’s pretty important that you have a .com — especially if you’re doing offline promotions. People automatically think “.com” when they’re trying to remember the URL to your website.
But then again most website traffic comes through links so that should always send people to the right site – unless people link to you with .com when you don’t own the .com version ;)
In my observation, anyone who wants to protect their brand needs to register .com, .net, and .org domains for the same spelling. If your blog becomes popular (or even before), spammers will register the .com or .net or .org to try to profit off of type-in errors and other spammy misrepresentations. On the other hand, only if your blog becomes megapopular and/or you start to earn bucks big enough to do it, register other domains that spammers might try.
After you register all three, think about whether you want to use .com, .net. or .org as your main domain extension. Then have all three point to one domain name.
As with brand names you can succeed with ANYTHING. Its just a question of how much work you want to do to brand and market the domain.
Some domains will actually help you – most of those are bought already, things like business.com would be a huge asset.
Some domains are neutral – average .com’s, good .net’s
Some domains are a bit of work – like a .net
Some domains are a lot of work – countries, .info, .biz etc
If you do choose a non .com domain name its good to write the extension in your logo and any time you write the name. So for example, lots of people have mentioned that they mix up problogger.com and .net (something I’ve done myself!). To combat this, you would have a logo which said problogger and then in smaller letters ‘.net’, and any time you write Problogger, you would write Problogger.net, until that actually becomes the brand.
Also if you have a series of domain names that are linked somehow then its always good to have uniformity through them all. So if you had say theTechBlog, theGadgetBlog and theBusinessBlog then it would be much better if they all ended in the same suffix for ease of memory.
And finally (sorry didn’t realise i had so much to say), if you plan to make a big brand – particularly if its country specific to begin with, it can be worth registering the .com and .net domains for your domain to ensure noone else gets them.
Collis
In terms of SEO, does the TLDs (whether .com, .net, or .info for that matter) makes any difference in the eye of search engines?
Go with a .com domain if at all possible. If you really want a name that is not available on the .com domains try adding “online” to it. I’m the webmaster for actress/comedian and sarahsilverman.com was taken so I made sarahsilvermanonline.com and I don’t regret it for a second.
I’d go with the dot-com name for any professional use.
Saying that, I do have a dot-be for my personal email address since my last name wasn’t available in any of the major TLDs.
But, when give my email address to various people, they always ask about the dot-be aspect. They don’t believe that it will work until they send an email. I also a problem with a banking site not allow me to enter the dot-be address. Of course I have a dot-com alternative that I use in those situations where people or machines can’t understand the dot-be TLD.
One advantage with having the dot-be personal email account is that I have less spam in that account than my dot-com email accounts.
I did set up a dot-org site for a non-profit group my son is involved with (the dot-org seemed more appropriate for the non-profit youth group). But, I also have the dot-com version of the name redirect to the dot-org site. Most casual internet users always think of dot-com. Having the dot-com redirect to the dot-org makes it easier those users.
This is an interesting topic, I have also been debating which domain is the most effective. I, like many others here prefer .com first and .net second. When I am typing a domain name it seems natural to enter .com and I would think this reaction would be typical.
I’m like everyone else. Go .com if you can. Definitely if you have a business-related site. I would also add to Michael Rew’s comment about registering the .org, .net domains. If you possibly can (obviously not possible for the person who sparked the initial question), also register you country (.com.ca) as well. (Here in Australia it’s easier to get a .com name than a .com.au. You cannot get a .com.au site unless you have proof that you are a business–business name, ABN or similar.)
Having said that, though, I would add the following two pointers.
1) There are some sites I won’t automatically type .com for. If I know it’s a charity or other organisation, I automatically type .org first. If I know it’s gov I type .gov.au (in my case), and if I know the person who created the site is in IT (e.g. developer), I’ll start with a .net.
2) If your site is solely for blogging and not to advertise a company, I think the domain you use is less important because you have to work to publicise your site, and most of that publicity is in the form of links via search engines, trackbacks, etc. I have a number of blogs favourited that I have no idea of the address. If I want to find them and don’t have access to my Favourites I hit Google before trying anything else. For that you need a memorable name rather than a domain. Someone mentioned Kathy Sierra earlier. I don’t bother trying to find her site, I just google Creating Passionate Users.
I live in Australia and almost 9 out of 10 of my web searches are filtered on “pages from Australia” since I am usually looking for local businesses or news or information tailored for this country. So I would only choose a country domain if you wanted to be found by people from that location,. You might get a good domain name out of .tv for a tv blog. I hate del.ic.ious and all delicious style domain names and almost always avoid them.
Problogger.com seems to have expired. I wonder what will happen to it. Could be worth thousands.
I think .com is a must for a site to grow in traffic and returning visits, mainly because .com domains are easier to remember. But .net isn’t unworthy at all. If a brand is already known enough, like Problogger.net, then .net is good.
Therefore, branding may be more important then the domain.
.coms are still better. Its too bad, but the general population has .com stuck in their brains.
I agree with the consensus .com or .net. If you are blogging, I don’t think the name is quite as important as if you are doing ecommerce.
You probably won’t be doing any marketing where you need a memorable name.
Since it came up :-) if you have an ecommerce site, say your name outloud to see if it’s easy to remember. Even adding a
dash com dot com can give you an opportunity: ABC-com.com
AND… remember therapist.com !
.com might be better as its the most commonly used. dot net started taking the market soon when ppl started lagging in dot com.I guess it doesnt matter.
.info is not hot at this time but time will come when .info will be in demand as ,net now
Like so many others, I too, vote for .com as the best choice. I think sites like ProBlogger.Net are exceptions to the rule. As one person pointed out, blogs from people like Seth Godin, etc. are long but effective due to their branding and not so much their domain names. However, whenever I want to go to their blogs, I always have to refer to my bookmarks or use Google to find them. This is very inconvenient!
When I first set up my old website at stevenguyenonline dot com, I thought long and hard about the domain name. After having it for a year, I decided it was time for a name as well as backend change (from Joomla > WordPress). So the old stevenguyenonline dot com got a name change to BeyondBehaviors.Com. And though the site is still very new, I’m quite happy with the change to WordPress and the new domain name.
I think for the U.S. and English-speaking websurfers, my old domain name was difficult to recall, let alone spell. Thus I think the new name is perfect!
So for me, it’s .com.
I also agree. Dot Com seems to be the best. For some reason, there is some stigma attached to both dot net and dot org and all of the new domains that just scream spam. Now, I know this is untrue in a lot of circumstances, but that is just a personal view of mine.
In Australia I think a “.com.au” actually trumps “.com” quite easily.
So “.com.ca” might do the same in Canada. Then again it might not.
Wow. Allow me to offer a dissenting opinion. And a strong one. (Although my comment may be routed to spam because of my .org address! :-)
A .org domain is absolutely fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, there are some virtues. It sets your site apart. It allows you to get good domain names without stretching for things like mine-is-areallycool-site.com.
I have several active sites. All but one are based on .org addresses, and they’ve all met or exceeded my expectations. There’s nothing wrong with .org, and the crowd here saying that you need a .com or a .net is doing a real disservice for those who come looking for advice.
And to respond specifically to the question, my main site is Get Rich Slowly. DOT ORG. I’ve had no difficulty “branding” it. The biggest screw-up came when the New York Times mis-identified it as .com (thus proving the 43 comments before mine here). If the domain you want is only available as .org, take it.
My guidelines for domains are:
* Get a .com if you can. If you are an Australian business get a .com.au as well as your .com. If the site is mainly informational pick up the .info as well – or even use it as the main domain, this works well for one off conferences or minisites I think.
* Make sure you can say the domain name over the phone and have it easily understood.
* Keep it short if possible.
* Get somebody else to read it before you register, you don’t want your domain to have a second meaning like http://www.expertsexchange.com !
Are .com and .net best?
From my experience, when people are typing in a domain name into the address bar that they do not quite remember, they will default to .com, so that is a benefit of going for the original. (I sometime type in problogger.com instead of .net.)
When is it OK to not go with them?
One scenario I can think of to go with an oddball is when you have a very unique name (del.icio.us)
What factors do you consider when picking a domain name?
When picking a domain name, if you are a pioneer in your type of website, then come up with a unique name, but if your type of website is very saturated, have some keywords instead.
Think! Try to get a dot-com. If it’s taken, then think harder about your brand. Add simple words before or after your name. Who knows, you might come up with a unique name all to yourself! When I was thinking of my name, I wanted evolution or evolve, but they were taken. Instead I came up with a new kinda spelling and word, my own brand, and one that was easy to rank for in search engines! Think!