August 29, 2010

Ranking .info domains (or Does Google Hate .info?)

I am still personally struggling with the .info domain extension and am starting to wonder if it should be considered a viable option for anyone looking to get a new website off the ground. It’s low initial price and availability for some domain names have made it an option many are considering, but it seems to have its challenges as well.

As mentioned in a previous post, the .info domain seems to be a bit of a mystery. Domains with the .info extension have shown up as highly ranked in numerous web searches I have conducted in both research mode for keyword research and in normal web browsing. After originally perceiving the presence of a .info domain in the top results as a “weak” market that could be entered more easily, after some additional research it appeared that .info could rank well on its own and shouldn’t be considered as an automatic exclusion like some of the other non-.com, .net, or .org domain extensions.

With this as my background, I went back and found some keyword research that was discarded because of the absence of available .com, .net, or .org domain names and selected the most promising ones and picked them up with a recent order as I needed them to put my order over the amount to qualify for free private registration and at 99 cents each the math worked out well.

With one of the domains on a topic that already interested me that could be written about easily it quickly had a little over 10 pages of original content on it. It has links from a few other websites similar to other strategies used before, and Google just doesn’t seem to give it any love. I would be ok if it still wasn’t ranking highly for its keywords, but it isn’t even indexed yet by Google. The site includes things that normally bring the search engines running like using Wordpress and submitting a sitemap. It has also been manually submitted to each search engine.

If it were performing in a similar weak fashion in the other major search engines that would also help me to understand that something else was going on, but it ranks in the top 10 for its keywords in both Yahoo and Bing and seemed to accomplish its indexing and initial ranking there in normal timeframes.

This anecdotal evidence appears to support the idea that Google is placing the .info domain extensions into its “Google Sandbox” for a while before allowing them to make it into the index and results. It will be interesting to continue to follow these results and see how long it takes to make it into the Google index and rankings.

This information seems to indicate that if you go with a .info domain extension you should be prepared to wait a while for Google results and be prepared to exist on Bing/Yahoo for organic search traffic at first.

If you have had a better experience with .info domain names or have any tips to share that helped you in ranking and indexing them please share in the comments.

Search for your .info domains at GoDaddy or search from the box below: