.ws domains

[madmatt69]

Hey everyone,

I wanna register a particular domain and the only available tld is .ws. Now I know it's marketed by some registrars as meaning "website" but in reality means western samoa.

Will getting a .ws affect me negatively in global and US serps? It'll be hosted on a US based server.

Thanks for any info!

[Rodney]

the .ws extension will have no effect on your search engine rankings.

[cyberair]

I was recently offered a sweet keyword.ws and was skeptical about its power in the search engines. So, I decided to research a little and found that having a good keyword.anything is not so bad after all. Even if it isn't a .com, .net, .info, or some of the other more recognized names, having keyword.anything works.

At the end of the day, it gets the message through. Your website is about "keyword".

[edited by: tedster at 1:48 am (utc) on May 28, 2005]
[edit reason] remove specifics [/edit]

[Andreals]

I've wondered about this tld: do people say, "dot wuss?"

[Rodney]

do people say, "dot wuss?"

I thought people just said "dot doubleyou ess"

[cyberair]

I had a client in Florida that owns a taekwondo school in an area called Winter Springs. So, after not finding his desired domain in a .com, he was more than pleased to get a very specific keyword using the .ws extension, because it went well with WS (Winter Springs) :)

Now, if you have the chance of getting a recognized domain with .com, .net, or .info, it would be wiser to go that way. First, it will give you more credibility and secondly, a .ws will really bring down, or at least not contribute, to the value of your website. At the end of the day, .ws is really being prostituted from Western Samoa into all these other meanings, mostly Dot Web Site.

[Absolut]

I agree that the bigger issue is one of credibility.

Additionally, .WS is not well known, and any branding you do, you'll need to factor into it the loss of type-in traffic.