.com dominance. Thoughts and predictions for the future

[ambt]

It goes without saying that dotcoms are the most valuable domains. For most people, .com is the default TLD. A good site at .net might actually drive traffic to the guy who owns the .com, because some people will make a mistake when entering the address manually. Some new TLDs can rise their prices sharply and unexpectedly.

I am curious what your thoughts on this subject are.

Will it always stay that way? Will the value of .coms increase with time, or can they have serious alternatives in the future?

There are many squatters on .coms and most usable names are taken. Do you think a decent .com (let's say 2 words) is better than an excellent, short non-.com?
Are the new TLDs going anywhere? Will they ever compete with .coms in their respective niches? Will they never achieve any real significance?

Do you think it is a good idea to keep some decent .coms if you think there is a chance you might set up a website there? Or better to cancel them, save money, and when the time comes, just register a non-.com?

I just wonder what you guys think about it.

[keyplyr]

I serve my web properties using .net, but own & forward several .com versions & misspellings. Paid for the max time when the prices were low & always update for the max. This I believe is a trust factor with SEs.

The .net allows me privileges in some directories, libraries, firewalls, etc that .com makes either difficult or costly. Example: the old Yahoo directory allowed .net free listing but charged .com $300 per year.

[tangor]

Some things become standards and .com is up there with gold, silver, and oil. :)

Having the comparable net, org either owned or pointing to, makes a large difference. Or, failing to control those can also make a large difference!

[RedBar]

Quite simply, IMHO, unless one is only focussing at a national level, then there is only com/net/org since the search engines have made it this way, trying to make a non-c/n/o rank internationally is a very, very hard task.

It's not impossible however when you do find a non-c/n/o ranked just look at what it is surrounded by.

Furthermore you may also find in many non-Google.com searches that c/n/o can rank better than the local tlds which leaves many webmasters extremely annoyed and frustrated.

I have had this for many years with ridiculous trade widget US.coms ranking in Google.co.uk.

Why are they ridiculous? Because the US is an importer of all these widgets, not a prime producer and exporter yet, according to Google's bias, they are the most relevant results.

I used to have my company name in many different extensions but have cut out many of them now since, even when being a relevant and unique site, the search engines simply refused to ranking them correctly.

Only yesterday I let go of five .in names since they would not rank outside of India and I am seriously contemplating moving my biggest .in site over to a .com because of Google and Bing's infatuation with c/n/o.

Guess what? I never have any ranking problems with any of my .com sites!

[accurate]

.com is king!

[branko97]

Since Google parenth company made its main page in .xyz instead of .com I would expect that domain to get some value.