The com version will be extremely difficult to displace but I feel up to the task however...
#1 - The com version has received sitelink status at #1 in Google serps. Can this be challenged?
#2 - My version is a me domain and I am not sure how those fare in Google to begin with.
Does anyone have any experience with either of these topics?
I appologize if this has been written about, I searched but looking up ".me" turns every word with the letters "me" into ".me" on this forum. "Sometimes" becomes "S.metimes" for example, tough to understand some titles because of it.
-Montenegro issued tender for a global registrar to handle .me, Godaddy got the nod here in the US.
-Montenegro expressed believing that .me would be better suited for global use (read: nic.me).
-The sheer volume of US citizens snapping up .me domain names seems to cement the prospect of .me becoming an eventual generic domain.
I got my answers from Google however. Google follows ICANN rules and as such the .me domains represents traffic from/to Montenegro which means it will not rank as highly as a .com on Google.com for now BUT the majority of .me domains are now owned by english speaking people, Montenegro is largely Serbian, which would make it harder to reverse what has been done. The 2 year minimum registration was even dropped in favor of the US standard 1 year minimum to make it easier for us to pick up more of them.
So ... mark October of 2008 as the month you either seized the opportunity, or avoided it, and let time be the judge on wether you won big or lost. It will be a few years before the jury is in but watch out if ICANN moves to make it generic at any time which would actually make sense at this point. Leave it to Godaddy to all but make it ours.
Personally I like owning some of the oldest .me domains already, it will look mighty good in the whois registry many years from now. Also, Google.com has begun handing out pagerank to the .me sites built in June, the local acceptance can't be ignored imo.
I performed a site:.me search to find over a million .me sites listed in Google.com, many with a lot of indexed pages BUT any site using a local social network of any kind is getting trumped by that network. Even exact name matches for long tail articles show several popular social networks ahead of the source in rankings.
It would seem that a) .me domains aren't rated in the same manner as .com tld's yet (too new perhaps) and b) it's an uphill battle to gain traction for now. The .me tld has already been widely accepted so it's a matter of time before the playing field is leveled most likely. I don't see .me passing .com ever but just like a solid .net can beat a .com I think it will happen with .me sites eventually.
