I am about to buy a DOT WS domain. Before that i have a little question about its preference in search engines. Is DOT COM more preferred in search engines then DOT WS ?
There should be nothing wrong with any domain extension as long as you do good job in optimizing. Many sites both in .com, .info, .asp, ect are doing good and were used abusively, so it's on the matter or optimization.
Not at all, we have some disposable domains that are .WS and they do great. The only issue is with branding, apparently most people only know of .COM and the returning customer/visitors rate is much lower than a .com. A percentage of your visitors that don't bookmark your .WS domain will probably end up visiting your .COM competitor. We have learned that whenever we start a new website (non disposable / not for testing) we always try to find one with all the extensions (at least the important ones .com, .biz, .org, .net, etc) available and we always buy all of them. At the same time if you are not worried about the brand and you are only looking for a keyword rich domain for rankings on an SEO point of view there is no difference. Some people say that cheap TLDs that sell for a couple of bucks are usually used by spammers so there is a myth that google will be more cautious on those. Sincerely I still haven't seen any proofs but in theory it makes some sense.
I'd say, .coms are more preferable. .ws is a ccTLD and should be used if you try to geo target your site to Western Samoa.
I find that search engines generally prefer .com .net and .org domains. And if the domain name is the same name as the keyword you are targeting, then that would definitely give you a give boost in the serps. However, you could rank really well with almost any domain name extension as long as it has good seo and a huge number of quality backlinks.
Buy the .ws and do what you normally do I've had a travel .ws site and it was ranking very good in a very popular travel niche.
most of the sites use dot com...but whether its do com or dot ws, it's still depends on how you SEO it..
I have been searching commonly used keywords on Google for a long time. I have yet to see a single .ws appear on the first page of google unless I search specifically for .ws, GDI or Global Domains International. I suspect it is due to several factors, the first one being is a majority of .ws domain owners are just spamming the GDI opportunity with their .ws. Another reason is the basic package that GDI offers is what most users have, it's very limited and content is king. The basic package for 10 bucks a month does not allow a real webmaster or marketer nearly enough space to build a quality content rich website. 90 percent of all .ws websites are just capture pages for the GDI opportunity. At a dollar per month subscriber commission, I don't feel it's even worth the time promoting. Others opinions will vary. The marketing is clever but transparent enough. You can have yourownname.ws.....Newsflash, there is a pretty darn good chance you can have yourownname.com unless your name is johnsmith and you can have it for under 7 bucks a year vs 10 bucks a month. If our serious about owning your own website, invest in real hosting.
if you want to target global market then .com is better for you. but if you want to target specific region lets say uk or canada then .co.uk or co.ca will be preferable then .com