Do different TLD’s affect SEO?

Well I’ve been invited onto the SEO Panel at T.R.A.F.F.I.C in Dublin next week which is a conference all about domains. With this in mind I thought I would dedicate this week to some domain related blog posts, this is the first post on “Do different TLD’s affect SEO?”

The Prep
This came to mind because recently I bought a number of domains two of which I bought were a .org and a .co.uk. Now I only bough the .org because I didn’t want anyone to purchase it instead of me but my focus was on the .co.uk so I redirected the .org through the hosting control panel as a 301 (but they lied it was a 302!) to the .co.uk.

All I did was put a holding page on the .co.uk I didn’t submit any domain to the search engines, didn’t do any link building, ping any articles out but I noticed the .org appeared in Google SERP’s. A few weeks later the .co.uk appeared but ranked far lower than the .org, this is not an indpeth peice of research but does point the finger that may be google places .org TLD’d with a little more favour than a .co.uk?

Research
So I carried out some research on the subject, personally I’ve never really had a problem with domains but an instinct has always made me be aware of .tv, .biz, .info despite i have seen some ranking well, i just don’t like them! Anyway I digress but I came across an article on the Google cache about TLD’s in SEO showing bias to .org domains, this study was carried out in 2008 so that’s two years ago which in terms of Search is a “long time” however the data seemed to correlate to what i had briefly experienced.

Their Investigation

There are several ranking factors we need to control.

1. domain age (purchase new domains at same time)
2. link profile (use Google sitemaps for indexing)
3. indexing age (randomize ordering of multiple subdomains in sitemaps submissions)
4. on-site factors (identical text, content)

So, for the preliminary examination, we purchased 3 domains, identically named, with different top level extensions (.org,.com,.net). We then created 3 separate subdomains on each of these domains so that we could create some sort of result duplication and randomize the order of submissions to Google sitemaps. Finally, we created identical content on each site and identical sitemaps.

The Results were as follows:

What else is on the web?

Well the introduction of .co domains has had people in a stir but Google did release the following:

We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geo-targeting options in Google Webmaster Tools.

What about actual listings?

I read a good article on SEOmoz by Randfish about ranking correlation for Google v’s Bing and it does show some interesting information. They basically took the data set for 11,351 search results for various phrases and then compared the ranking elements to show what would be comparably negative or positive in ranking correlation between Google and Bing.

The first image below shows that URL length has a more negative effect i.e. shorter URL’s are more predominately ranked higher in the dataset. it also showed that a domain other than .com was more likely to rank higher. The data does also show that this has more impact in Google than Bing.

Next up is the TLD section this is based on what ranks higher when a TLD has an exact keyword match domain. This clearly shows that .com exact match domain rank higher than other TLD’s.

Finally the post looked at TLD from a generic perspective i.e. not linked to an exact keyword in the URL, this showed that .org domains in general seemed to rank higher than other domains, this is true for both Google and Bing.

What is the percentage spread of domain names on the web?

After further research I came across a domain name report from Verisign http://www.verisign.com/domain-name-services/domain-information-center/domain-name-resources/domain-name-report-june10.pdf this has a lot of good information inside but my particular concern is around the domain percentage on the web. The reason for this is that the SEOmoz data is very good but I wanted to check the data by looking at the percentage spread of domain names.

You can see that .com domains are clearly the biggest share of domain names owned on the web currently and so it’s not surprising that when 44% of domains on the web are .com that you would more often or not see them ranking higher than other domains. It is useful to correlate this information against some test data such as what I have shown above from SEOmoz.

Conclusion

I think it is difficult to gauge the information overall as the SEOmoz dataset only used the 1st page results and dosn’t compare domain further down the listings, however I would agree so far that .org domain seem to have a slight edge on other domains in Google’s index anyway.

I’ve been writing this article over a two day period and the good thing about doing it like this is that you question what your writing, I have revisited the domain that I have purchased which were .org and .co.uk and when doing an exact match text search in Google the .org appears higher even though it 302 redirects to the .co.uk I think in my opinion I would avoid the cheaper domains and always go with either a specific ccTLD or go with a .com or .org