.Travel?

Will search engines boost .travel domains?

[Noname_Nick]

Given .travel domains will only be sold to authorized and legitimate travel industry sites, does anyone think there will be a ranking boost given to those sites?

If you owned a travel site, would you purchase .travel domains?

[Webwork]

Should SEs boost .net sites for networking searches?

Should SEs boost .org sites for organization searches?

Do you see any solid evidence for either of the above? I don't. So I doubt things will change for the new extension.

Will .travel sites be any better resources merely because of the extension? Nope. So why rank based upon extension only?

[google.com...] Looks a lot like .org rules the category. No surprise. Don't see any .museum domains.

Will Expedia.com drop .com and set up business under .travel? Doubtful.

.Pro certainly has flopped gloriously. Maybe .travel is worried they could suffer a similar fate? With that in mind it will be interesting to see how the .travel registry goes about marketing the .travel domain.

Since it's supposed to be restricted to licensed agencies the marketing could be pretty direct: Trade journals, trade organizations, etc.

However, the .travel registry may take the alternate path and attempt to market the domain to webmasters, SEOs, etc. - the Web advisors to the industry "as it not exists" - and next we'll start to see evidence that they hired a buzz marketing firm to go out and start spamming forums, blogs, etc.

Maybe things will change a decade from now, and there may be a SE bias, but for now I doubt the impact of .travel will be much greater than the impact of the addition of the .aero, .pro and .museum domains.

Frankly, if the needs of a profession are the justification for the addition of new restricted .TLDs then I can only hope they will enforce their restrictions. Just having a travel site ought not to qualify someone to grabe a .travel domain. However, if the registry starts to hunger for money to support or justify it's own existence/profitability - versus acting as a non-profit promoter/guardian of professional travel firms and professional standards - then we may soon see the garbage-ization of the TLD. All the registry has to do to produce this outcome is to loosen the standards for registration.

Interesting to watch.

[edited by: Webwork at 5:18 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2005]

[Noname_Nick]

I agree - although on your top point there is no restriction on those. .Travel is restricted - at least appears to be. I won't be holding my breath though.