Broker to take on a portfolio of smallish domains

[BritishARMY]

I've found .info seems to be harder to rank than .com or .co.uk. They can rank really well as I've seen from some sites at the top that are .info, however all of our .com's and .co.uk's ranked really well for low competitive keywords, however the .info's ranked really badly for low competitive keywords. I suppose a way to test it would be to try and rank for a specific low competition keyword and then buy the .com and .info domain of the keyword, optimise it the same way and vary the content a bit.

[hooperman]

Google might say that they don't differentiate with a tld, but they do.

show me an example of where a .biz .info or .us outranks a .com or .org in a higher competition keyword.

Given that Matt Cutts says they don't treat TLDs differently but you say they do, forgive me if I go with MC on this one

As you've done the testing, could you provide the proof?

[mgallone]

I don't think the performance of .biz, .info etc domains in the SERPS has anything to do with extension- maybe there is just a correlation with people who try to buy the cheapest possible domain and a lack of website quality? I haven't done any studies into this so I couldn't begin to claim I knew this, but I've also noted that .info's are EXTREMELY popular with people on Flippa, DP etc who buy a domain, throw a cheap site on and try to get as much profit as possible. This may be why they do poorly in SERPS JockP.

[JockP]

Given that Matt Cutts says they don't treat TLDs differently but you say they do, forgive me if I go with MC on this one

As you've done the testing, could you provide the proof?

Sure.

Do the following.

Put the above extensions in and search for them in Google.

".biz"
".info"
".us"

What kind of websites come up on the first page ?
60-90% of the are .com's they are not all .biz or .info etc. (that tells you that Google does favor specific tld's over the other extensions)

Then when you put the following extensions in google with " " every website that comes up on the first page come up with the respective extensions e.g. .com for all of the websites

".com"
".org"
".net"

Now

let's take take the .com versus .org versus .net. Now this data is from my testing and has been formed with my own opinion.

I have had great success ranking .com's then .org's not so much with .net. I will show you an example of such below.

Type in Nevada personal injury attorneys. I came accross this the other day. If you actually look at the third stie www.nevadapersonalinjuryattorneys.org you will see that it is a few months old, has a handful of links and an exact match .org and is beating 5-10 year old sites with thousands of links.

My point.

Don't take people's words for gospel truth, actually do the testing yourself and make up your own mind.

It's liking me saying listen to Bill Clinton, because he says that he didn't have sexual relations with that women. It may be a bad example but do your own research first before shooting off truisms that other people are dishing out, even if the man does works for Google.

Again this opinion has been based from my own test data. if you can prove me wrong on the above I will be happy to continue my conversation and also interested in what you find.

[hooperman]

Do the following.

Put the above extensions in and search for them in Google.

".biz"
".info"
".us"

What kind of websites come up on the first page ?

Sites that do a very good job of giving you content about ".biz" etc. When you do that search, you aren't doing a search for sites with the .biz extension. You're searching for content about ".biz".

Type in Nevada personal injury attorneys. I came accross this the other day. If you actually look at the third stie www.nevadapersonalinjuryattorneys.org you will see that it is a few months old, has a handful of links and an exact match .org and is beating 5-10 year old sites with thousands of links.

But they aren't targeting "Nevada personal injury attorneys" as well as you! In addition to your exact match domain, you have an exact match in the <title> and links with exactly that in the anchor text. Nobody is seriiously targeting this phrase. The ones that are, are beating you. Unless I've missed one (which is always possible )

Can you give me a website that you're beating that you think should be higher than yours? The ones I looked at deserved to be lower than yours.

[dschall]

as peter said there is a difference between broad and exact match traffic...a very big one. Also a big difference in value in an exact match domain (emd) vs a keyword rich domain.

There are lots of people out there that believe there is an "exact match bonus" in the goog algo for .com, .net, and .org. I am a believer as well. The value of these domains is there because of matching a singular specific search query that gets lots of searches, or is a high value search term, or both.

Broad match is a terrible metric for valuing domain names - from google's help files -

"With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords....Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords. For example, if you're currently running ads on the broad-matched keyword web hosting, your ads may show for the search queries web hosting company or webhost".

That page you posted says "It shows the monthly search volume from Google for the keyword." This is incorrect and is very misleading.

Example: agenttravel.biz which is listed showing 1.5 Million searches a month for the Keyword "Agent Travel"

The exact match search volume for "agent travel" is 1900...from the same adwords keyword tool used to pull those other numbers.

You specifically mentioned keyword domains and did not say anything about exact match so I don't thing shinanigans by you or anything...just wanted to point out that there are people that do use broad match numbers in attempt to inflate value.

"I've been assigned the task of selling a bunch of domains"

Can you ask for reassignment? If you cannot, I would suggest separating the .net,.orgs, .co.uk, and the one word domains from the rest and focusing on them. Some of the two word .biz and .infos that make sense (football teams) could sell as well, but I would curb expectations. Run those through the adwords tool with exact match selected and see if any of them are worth attempting to sell. I wish you the best of luck with your sales.

[JockP]

simply put, a .com will beat a .biz .info or .us any day.

and I have had success ranking .com's and .org not so much .net.s

[mgallone]

Not true. Relevant content will rank high, regardless of the domain extension.

[tke71709]

simply put, a .com will beat a .biz .info or .us any day.

You can believe anything that you want, but you have yet to provide any proof.

[JockP]

Not true. Relevant content will rank high, regardless of the domain extension.

Google "dating russian models"

See the top site.

It has no content on it.....it is a one page website.

It ranks higher than the main site.

a good domain, with the right extension matters a lot in rankings