Hello, One of my client is thinking about buying one of the custom TLD that will be available in 2009. Do you guys have some ideas about the potential impact this type of TLD could have, not only on SEO, but generally speaking? I believe that, considering that those custom TLD will be sold between 100k-500k, this is really a sign of credibility for search engines, as only large corporations have the budget for this. But I am wondering what will happen...will the guy who owns the '.shop' per example sell domains using this TLD? So basically there will be an explosion of registrars? Or, we will assist to some sort of concentration, where all the potential shops will be interested to be hosted under a '.shop' domain? So basically my question is, what could be the potential advantages / disadvantages? Thanks a lot!
The person who runs the .shop REGISTRY could sell xxx.shop domain names directly and/or get REGISTRARS (GoDaddy, Namecheap...) to resell for them. (The same way that Verisign - operator of the .com registry - gets REGISTRARS to resell for them). All new TLDs will be regulated by ICANN and will have to follow ICANN regulations & policies. It won't be the 'wild west' and there won't be a problem with search engines indexing those sites. I don't expect to see 1000's of new TLDs or even 100's. If they let me operate the .php and .html registries I could really screw up the web.
hehehe, thanks for your reply! When you say 'could sell', it means that the registrant of the '.shop' TLD could decide not to sell any domain, and keep it for him?