Are .info domains still considered spammy ?
Happy Friday :)
Gary.
I had one that ranked well. Traffic was good. Wasn't in a competitive serp. Sold those sites.
Just checked G, still #1 out of 116k
Thanks RC :)
This is a travel site for an obscure, semi-exclusive resort area. I always thought .info felt appropriate relative to the content (which was thin, but decent --almost respectable). Also, users aren't typically techies. That's why I thought I could pull it off. That said, it might not work for spam-prone content categories where users have been stung and are more vigilant.
Google's official word is that TLD makes no difference (geo considerations aside).
They say that .edu and .gov have no special power, .info has no special pain. But that other factors associated with the sites on those TLDs drive the differences. In other words, at least officially, it does you no good to buy a .edu domain if you could versus buying a .info domain. If you could buy harvard.edu versus harvard.info, there would be a huge difference, but (again at least officially) no difference based solely on the TLD, but on the characteristics of the sites themselves.
Moz analysis of their ranking correlations says
QuoteThis data gives us more reason to believe Google's webspam chief, Matt Cutts, when he says .gov, .info and .edu are not special cased and don't receive special bonuses or penalties to rankings
https://moz.com/blog/google-vs-bing-correlation-analysis-of-ranking-elements
In looking for that reference, I also came across this
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/07/googles-handling-of-new-top-level.html
By the way, your question was
QuoteAre .info domains still considered spammy
And RC answered it, I think, from the user perspective. I was trying to throw out the official Google perspective.
Personally, as a user, I'm a bit leery of .info still, but with so many domains coming out people are getting used to diversity in the TLD I think.
When they first became available, I tried to convince a friend that he *needed* a .io domain for his business - it would have been perfect. But he said no, people only trust .com
Now I see tons of successful and respected .io sites and I wish I had just bought the domain for him and sat on it for a couple of years until he was ready to use it.
>Now I see tons of successful and respected .io sites
Same. But I **still** don't trust them. I hesitate every time for a moment before the click. During that moment, I automaticlly review the context. Is this a category noted for malware? Who referred? If it's in a serp, what are my alternatives?
RC - that's how I am still with .info, but .io seem to all be cool, hip app companies that don't believe in being evil ;-)
RC's comment makes me think that there is a follow-on SEO effect. If it's true, and it seems increasingly that it is, that Google uses CTR to impact rankings i some way or another, anything that hurts CTR hurts SEO to some degree.
So you lose twice - once by the simple fact of lower CTR and a second time by potentially getting pushed down in the rankings.
Of interest: do a search for "spain" and note where spain.info ranks.
>The Tourist Offices of Spain are the representatives abroad of the Instituto de Turismo de España
Official Tourist Offices get a handjob, though they don't need it because they get massive free backlinks. But still, it makes a good point to a client.
I have so much to learn :)
Enjoy the long weekend,
Gary.
I've been trying to build software to get the info i need, but programmatically it's quite hard, proxies blah ..
I did think maybe we could build a simple distributed HTTP proxy, and use it to route G queries, all it takes is enough numbers and variable exit nodes and it may be viable ?
Gold dust for SEO, and enough SEOs to make it viable if we rotated requests etc, but this must have been tried before?
Question i've been meaning to ask, crap results on search, what sites are there that monitor, probe and have test sites to test G as a program ?
I'm thinking a dummy site and get it to rank for extremely obscure queries, then any change in on-site would be quickly reflected in rankings ?
I've found no info, can't quite form the right query to probe the beast about probing the beast ;+}
I have never ever had a problem with any kind of TLD/ccTLD. In fact of all the domains I've owned and worked on, 95% have been ccTLD.
.info ranks just fine.
Quote from: gm66 on April 30, 2016, 12:54:24 AM
I've been trying to build software to get the info i need, but programmatically it's quite hard, proxies blah ..
Were you looking to prove that .info's don't rank as well?
As others have said (and G), TLDs seem to be treated equally. For a while .info's were being given out for free, and they came out later than the other gTLDs... those two things together I think go a long way in explaining why there aren't so many established .info domains. 1) Because big/long-standing brands were already established and 2) Because of the idea that info domains are of lower quality. Maybe there's a monetising element to it also.
G is fairly scrape-able, though you do want to rate limit and it takes a bit work. There's a quite a few SERP checkers out on the open that scrape hundreds of thousands (or maybe millions) of search results a month
You can rank any TLD, but in most cases I would prefer a .com or ccTLD for longer term projects.
If the prices of those are out of reach I would usually consider picking a different name rather than going with a .info.
I think .info is used reputably (along with .biz even!) in some German speaking markets, but outside of those mainstream usage of those TLDs by legitimate businesses tends to be quite rare.
There are at least 3 or 4 big issues with .info...
- When Google's exact match domain bonus was absurdly high it applied to most ccTLDs along with .com, .net, .org ... but did not apply to .biz or .info or .us
- The point mentioned earlier about webmasters being skeptical or suspicious is important in terms of link building & audience building among other webmasters
- There are also some consumer-related issues. For instance, alt TLDs make branding harder & people are also most likely going to be less likely to click on a weird TLD in the SERPs when compared against a .com. And if you go to build a big brand, each $ you spend on branding will have some amount of slippage due to the TLD issue.
- Back in 2008 Google did end up purging .info domains (http://www.seobook.com/google-temporarily-purges-info-domain-names), at least temporarily