hey gang Any consensus out there on how various TLD's rank? Meaning does a .com rank higher than a .us or .net (all else being held constant)? Has google and the rest mentioned anything like this for their algorithm?
The widely used answer is that they all have an equal chance of ranking, but I don't believe it as I don't see .us, .ws etc ranking high and constantly in SERPs.
Could that be because those TLD's are newer and therefore wouldn't rank as well due to the (young) age of the site?
Doubtful - they've been around long enough in the game to start ranking high. Look at .info, which has been around since 2001 - I cant even remember if I've ever seen one appear for a decent search term anywhere on pages 1-3. Keep in mind - all of those .com's created in the past year or two which are getting huge rankings in SE's.
I think it mostly has to do with popularity, and so they can be ranked...but just in the amount of users that purchase those tld's for their domains. ".com" is by far the most popular - but the newer ones that come out usually cost more to register. So when a new tld comes out, it's like the "new fad", and so they up the price. But like it has been stated - .com has been around for a while and still seems to be the most popular.
a good case is to google "tiny URL" tiny.cc is the first comes up but I'm 99% sure that tinyurl.com is the most popular site... I'll keep my ears open... I'm sure the real answer's got to be out there somewhere..
lweeks - meaning since .com is more popular, it will rank higher? Seems kind of a superficial "rule" but it makes sense.
all the TLDs would rank the same given that you do proper SEO/link building. only time a TLD would make a difference is when you are geo targeting in which case a co.uk domain would rank better in UK than a .com domain.
wouldn't search engines view other TLD's as sites trying to impede in an existing one? Like say, www.computers.com rules all searches for computers... and someone registers, computers.us just as well optimized as computers.com.... to technically, both of these should rank the same? Holding everything as equal on both sites?
I dont know but something ive found is that setting up a site targetted at a UK audience on a .co.uk and hosted on UK located servers helps ranking for a very new website. Plus keeps the traffic around 99% UK, as intended.