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by spocked 3906 days ago
By 'non standard', do you mean the new ones like .club, .online, .global or just any extensions that are not .com, .org or .net?

(a) Brand new extensions - it will depend on whether Google considers the specific tld as a global tld (like it does for .io and .co). If so, then ranking in the search results may not be a problem.

(b) Global extensions like .io, .co - there are ample examples of startups that have used an "io", "co" or "ly" domain extensions. customer.io, intercom.io - startups are better of buying a $50 domains name, than spending hundred of thousands of dollars on getting the .com version of a popular word.

Traffic Penalty: There will be some loss from type-in traffic. But people have been posting domain names directly in the search engines, so its likely that type in traffic has decreased substantially. I see this as not being important in the future.

Trust & Brand Penalties: If the customers are not early adopters, then there might be a trust penalty as very few people have even heard of the new domain extensions.

1 comments

Yes, and I'm considering getting a .online TLD vs paying thousands to a squatter vs buying a .org that isn't as good.

Thank you, I had not considered the 'global' consequences which are important to me because I think most of my traffic will be arriving from long tail search