Does TLD matter for search engine rankings?

I know that keywords in the domain name give your site a push in the search engine rankings, but do .info names pull less weight than a .com?

 

Not at all. Supposedly all extensions are treated the same, although, despite what Matt Cutts publicly claims, I have seen evidence that .gov domains have a slight advantage, if not only for a speculative trust bonus.

 

From what I have read and heard.. tlds do not matter..

 

I doubt that google would want to deal with the fallout from 'discriminating' based on tld. New extensions coming soon....

http://www.betanews.com/article/New_Domain_Names_Coming_in_2008/1178899698

 

Yes it does for country extensions and when using the country Google search or ticking the "Pages from xxxx".

As for .info having less weight then say .edu or .gov based on extension only, then no there's no difference.

 

sweetfunny is right. It does matter if you are targeting a specific country outside of the US.

But besides that, it does not matter.

 

Also, .gov, .edu and .mil links still have bigger power, despite what can anybody claim.

But this makes sense only for links, not domains being targeted. Apart from value of ccTLD, .info and .com has no real difference for SERPs.

 

Even with keywords inside, for Google doesn't mean much. For others in some way yes.

 

Of course it does..
Why do you think so?

 

Does what?

 

You are saying that a keyword in a domain does not matter for google ??

 

Yes, that's what I claim. If keywords inside even has any meaning, then it's one of the least important thing. In high competitive areas this has almost no power.
But if you have any proofs for your thesis, please share.

 

No .. tld give no love for serps

 

If you are targetting the word "webmaster scripts"

And you have 2 domains --- (a) Webmasterscripts.com and (b) hellogirl.com

If you SEO both of them equally, then webmasterscripts.com will rank over hellogirl.com

If you still don't believe me, try it.

 

Ok, and how much exactly does it boost serp? Can you say in percents?

 

The exact weighting of tld in SERPs may be unknwon but experiments suggest that a keyword in the URL can be a factor in ranking. It is assumed that for a domain name to have a relevant keyword, it must be serving pages that have content built around it and therefore more useful to a searcher.

This fact is however negated by big and old URLs that lack relevant keywords but have appeared higher than those that didnt have it.

I have experience with a site that did estimates for people who were moving out of state. The site did not have moving boxes in the URL but it was always above all the other listings with moving in their URLs.

So keywords in URLL helps but maybe minimally.

 

You cannot be sure, and give percentages.
It's just an obvious assumption made by experience.

 

the .gov, .mil, and .edu domains may get some more Google love than the rest but it is not worth discussing since we can't get our hands on them

 

Plenty of examples, but here's one.

Search for "establishes" without quotes, #3 is me from 42.4 Million results.

#1 is Whitehouse.gov and #2 is Wikipedia

It's beating PR7 pages, .edu, .gov etc and honestly my backlinks and SEO are a joke/non-existance. It's riding a #3 spot with over 42 million results really on domain name alone. Been there for months and hardly budge a spot.

The search term appears just twice on my page, and isn't even in the Meta Keywords.

 

And nobody searches for it

I get you at #6 when i search it. Must be hitting a different DC.

But your right. That is primarily based on domain name alone that you are ranking there. It's not a keyword anybody is optimizing for, so its not seen in the anchor text of many backlinks to any of those 41 million sites.