Simple yes or no question



I have done a small experiment, and my conclusion was that .info hurts your rankings IF you're trying to rank for the exact match domain name.

I had a site, tastydogsandwich.info which was ranked 50+ for "tasty dog sandwich"*

It had some content, and a handful of backlinks.

As soon as i bought tastydogsandwich.org, and 301'd the info to it, the .org almost immediately bumped up to #3 in the SERPS for "tasty dog sandwich" and stayed there - no other changes.


*not the actual keyphrase :D
 
amateursurgeon said:
I have done a small experiment, and my conclusion was that .info hurts your rankings IF you're trying to rank for the exact match domain name.

I had a site, tastydogsandwich.info which was ranked 50+ for "tasty dog sandwich"*

It had some content, and a handful of backlinks.

As soon as i bought tastydogsandwich.org, and 301'd the info to it, the .org almost immediately bumped up to #3 in the SERPS for "tasty dog sandwich" and stayed there - no other changes.
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Good stuff AS, a couple of ?s

1. are you positive that tastydogsandwich.info was unregistered before you picked it up. .info domains have been spammed to death due to their price, it is possible it was under some sort of a penalty from a previous lifetime.

2. what was the domain history for tastydogsandwich.org when you bought it? Age, any content & previous backlinks. If it had any, the bump you saw might have been the combination of the 2 .... it is rare to see an immediate bump after 301s though. This redirection usually take a while to settle.

All things even, if you had picked up tastydogsandwich.com and 301'd it there, likely #1. If the .com bonus is x10 then the .org/net bonus is x8 and the .info bonus is x2 (not real numbers, just trying to give a visual).

It's hard to say it "hurt" your SERPs because if the domain was lsfjijef.com then you likely would not have been in the top 100. So it likely helped some, just not as much as it could have.
 
@erect, have replied in PM, as I'm not sure how to check that one, and would be interesting to find out.

@OP - I think this should illustrate that when it comes to SEO, there is no such thing as a simple yes / no question :D
 
Have you considered using more than one domain?

Think about it...

You could grab two positions AND you'd find out for sure if the .info was penalized in some way.

James
 
amateursurgeon said:
@OP - I think this should illustrate that when it comes to SEO, there is no such thing as a simple yes / no question :D
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I guess not. Good discussion though.

Pathfinder said:
Have you considered using more than one domain?
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Yes. That was actually my plan from the get, I just needed one "main" domain that is going to be used for the ultra money site. I plan on creating a bunch of "mini" sites on separate categories in the main site and have them point to the main site, so I am still going to use the .info to some extent.

erect said:
Check out the words in bold ... that's the LSI I'm talking about. It's basically synonyms. So for instance, if google finds a page about grapes they would also expect the words wine & vineyards to be on the page. So .. if you're trying to rank for "keyword faq" then a .info name might give you a bump.
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Awesome read, even if not proven makes a shitload of sense, thanks.
 
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