Alternate Extensions Strike Back

After our poll results from earlier in the week showed that .net is favored a full 3rd of the time by domainers looking to develop keyword domains, I did some searching to find how well alternative extensions are doing in search results. Now, I don't know of a scientific way of doing this as the percentage of developed and ranked alternative extensions are a small fraction of the .com base, so the results are sure to be skewed. I decided to just check anecdotally looking at both common search phrases and "trending topics" to see how well the various alternative extensions were representin'. I only looked at first page rankings and did a random sampling of terms from various "top search query" sites. I also focused on Google but future posts will discuss rankings on other search engines.

Let's start with some good news:

Cyber Monday

• CyberMonday.net is 3rd - really second as CyberMonday.com has the first two entries.


• CyberMonday.fm is 5th below wikipedia and also below the news results. Nice result for a .fm!

Mortgage Calculator

• MortgageCalculator.org is #2, but #3 mortgage-calc.com has two entries with the same meta data but two different pages. Impressive.


• MortgageCalculator.net is next, right after news results? Pushing news results a bit much aren't we?

Science Fair Project

• All-Science-Fair-Projects.com should get a special award for being #1 in ranking and in the number of dashes!


• A couple of .org's ranking in 2nd and 3rd place and another in 6th - likely due to educational slant of the term?


• ScienceFairProject.VirtualAve.net is 5th

Santa Claus

• SantaClaus.net is 4th right after the "business listings" for Santa Slaus. Classic


• NORADSanta.org is 5th for the official NORAD tracking site.

Now the bad apples:

• Tiger Woods: none


• Tom Brokaw Accident: zip


• What does my name mean: zilch


• Currency Converter: nada

Conclusions

• Well, the first conclusion is, .org and .net are by far the most represented in search results of all the alternative extensions, but they are also the most likely alternative extensions to be developed.


• Having names like BlackFriday.info and CyberMonday.fm show up on the first page of results for major keywords shows that it's possible to rank just about anything


• Trending topics and news stories tended to favor .com


• Similarly, keyword relevance in the domain name (even if it was a subdomain) seemed to play a large role, particularly for alternative extensions.

I found this exercise quite interesting and will be following up with more posts along these lines whether you like it or not, but I'd love to hear your feedback at @UtterDomain.