Don’t you just hate it when you waste time and money on something only to have the rug pulled out from under your feet for no apparent reason? That’s how millions of legitimate .info domain owners feel about Google’s treatment of .info domains.
I personally own three .info domains which I registered because I assumed the .info TLD was for “information” sites just as .com TLD is supposed to be for “commercial”, .net for “network” and .org for “organizations”. I have spent countless hours developing my .info sites with quality original content and the best intentions. It’s a shame that not a one of my three .info domains actually rank in Google for any keywords; not even for a search of the domain name using quotes. Too bad that Google can’t find a better way to handle domain spam.
It’s no longer a secret that Google does not want anything to do with .info domains. Aaron Wall wrote about it last year when Google apparently purged all .info domains from their search results…
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Was the .info purge a glitch? Maybe, but Google never will accidentally filter out all .com domain names. This algorithmic tweak (especially when coupled with Matt Cutts’ prediction for 2008) shows an internal Google bias against .info domain names. While many .info domain names rank where they did just a few days ago, this does not bode well for the perceived value of .info domain names, especially for brand new domain names or parked pages. |
Why is Google taking this stance against all .info domain owners, even the legitimate ones? Possibly it is due to Matt Cutts’ prediction post…
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A top-level domain (TLD registry) will offer domains for under $4. The result will be another TLD blighted by spammy domain registrations. |
OK, so the entry point pricing for a TLD is what justifies Google labelling the entire TLD as “spammy” and thus removing the offending TLD completely from the search results?
Remember when you were back in elementary school and something happened in or out of class and the teacher couldn’t figure out who did it? What’s the teacher to do? Punish the whole class for the actions of one unless somebody confesses? Sure these strongarm tactics may get a confession but so does water-boarding. Punishing honest webmasters who did nothing wrong because of a few rotten apples is not unlike throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Punishing the innocent to get at the guilty a baseless, harmful concept. It also breeds resentment in the innocents because there’s nothing worse than getting punished for something you didn’t do.
Fast forward to 2009 and it’s simply mind-boggling that the biggest search engine on the internet can’t find a reasonable solution for weeding out “spammy” domains other than blacklisting an entire TLD. What’s next? Purge all domains owned by minority webmasters?
Anyway, the long and short of it - If you’re planning on doing any type of internet marketing that involves SEO as the cornerstone of your operation, forget about using any TLD other than a .com domain. If you don’t believe me, do a couple of Google searches for terms like “best credit cards”, “promote website” or “diet plans”, you will see that there is nothing but .com domains making it to the first page of Google.
Why Does Google Hate .info Domains?…
Don’t you just hate it when you waste time and money on something only to have the rug pulled out from under your feet for no apparent reason? That’s how millions of legitimate .info domain owners feel about Google’s treatment of .info domains….
yeah man i notice in google search only .com domains rank at the top. i only buy .com domains from now on.
Is it possible .info has very much potential for resale? I am going to buy some domains as an investment, for long term. Could thy work out in the future?
I bought a couple of .info domains some time ago, I think I will not bother developing content for them :(
Thanks for saving me time…
I have some info domains I am developing. This article is making me think twice about wasting that much time on them. Maybe they will still rank on really long tailed keywords?
I don’t believe Google hates .info domain, I have one info domain blog it has about 500 till 700 visitors everyday albeit it’s quite new domain, I just bought it october 2008 and it ranks well for competitive keywords in Google SERP(S).
I did now about these .info domains. I thought they were trustworthy. I even thought about buying one. But at the last moment I changed for a .net, and I have been able to rank high in google, so I guess it does not apply to these ones.
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i didn’t know they purged out .info domains. Si i guess if you plan to use your .info domain for your community, it would be ok since i believe .info are way cheaper than .com domains.
I think Google has a few domain extentions that it doesn’t like. I had an weight loss affiliate site with a .uk.com sub domain extention and although it ranked ok in Yahooo, Google was having none of it. I’ll be sticking to .com and .co.uk from now on I think.
Very nice information. Thanks for this.
Here must be clear distinction between the domains because it may lead to bead or inefficient search which may lead to the bad marketing of the website or organization.
Excellent stuff here great for both the basics and advanced methods!
Dumping all my .info domains. Hate it when this stuff happens but I’m sticking with .com from now on.
Thanks for the advice.
I think org domains are more powerful than info domains.
Weird, yesterday I still got PR3 for my .info and #2-3 on SERP. Today, the PR is gone not even 0. I thought this advice was not true yesterday. But today you’re right (still not hoping that). Let’s see tomorrow whether it will still like this or not. Rethink to buy .info from now on.
I had a .info domain an did rank well once upon a time, now im not even in the top 200.
Am sticking to .com domains now.
Some .info do get rankings, google for regular expressions and check out the first result. It’s got some good competition in the first few results.
However the site does have a lot of backlinks and I’m guessing they would all be pretty natural because of the good content on the site. It’s not really a keyword you can monetize much.
I find it unfair because they are .info domains which has very good content and yet they are unfairly treated.