Domain Extensions Matter
Posted at 9:16am EST on 01/29/2009
There has been and continues to be talk about whether your domain extension matters. Debates going back and forth about .edu, .gov, and .mil extensions being “trusted” more in the search results and on the flip side, other people saying that extensions don’t matter at all, only backlinks matter.
As part of Google’s recent push with new features and controls with Google’s Webmaster Tools, they released a snippet of text which actually shed some light into the matter.
If your site targets users in a particular location, you can provide us with information that will help determine how your site appears in our country-specific search results, and also improve our search results for geographic queries. You can only use this feature for sites with a neutral top-level domain, such as .com or .org. Country-specific domains, such as .ie or .fr, are already associated with a country or region.
Google, of course, does not disclose whether there are more “trusted” domain extensions out there, but they touch on country-specific ranking.
One of the original domain extensions, dot com (.com), is still by far the most widely used extension and can rank fairly well in just about any country-specific index. But, when you want to rank for a specific country, for example, Ireland, and your site is dedicated to everything Ireland, you would definitely want to get a dot ie (.ie) domain extension.
A site like this one, Google Inside, I opted for the dot com because I do not have a country-specific index which I am trying to target for search results. I would be just as happy to be in all of the indexes and rank well in all of the indexes.
It is still my personal belief that domain extensions as a whole, do not have a specific trust factor built into them. I do not believe that Google will trust a .edu or a .gov more simply because they are a .edu or a .gov, but because they have stronger and more on-target backlinks.
Let’s look at a couple of .edu and .gov sites. First, whitehouse.gov has a PageRank 9, which means they have a lot of backlinks. According to Google as of today, whitehouse.gov has 21,100 backlinks and Yahoo! reports 1,758,418. Obviously Google and Yahoo! have different reporting measurements, but the fact remains, whitehouse.gov has a lot of backlinks. Therefore, they have a lot of weight.
Secondly, let’s look at stanford.edu as the .edu example. Stanford.edu has a PageRank of 8 and has 6,240 backlinks in Google, while Yahoo! is reporting 653,087 backlinks. Stanford.edu has a lot of weight in the search results simply because it has a lot of backlinks.
Of course, without a doubt, site structure and internal linking will play a large role in how well these sites actually rank for specific terms, but the backlinks are going to be what help power those rankings.
The bottom line, I feel, is that Google does not have a special trust for domains with special extensions like .edu, .gov, or .mil, but Google will rank things according to how trusted they are as a domain — not just the extension.
