Do domain extensions matter in SE positioning?

Is a .com going to get better placement than a .biz?

[mountainwilliam]

Hello,
If I am building a site with the url blankety-blanks.biz and someone else already has a site with the url blankety-blanks.com will the .com site get better placement than my .biz site because of the extension, especially on google? The reason I ask is because, I already sell a certain product and have a site with the URL certain-product.com and another site with the URL certain-product.info. Both sites rank very well except on google, were I have noticed that certain-product.com is always #1 and certain-product.info is always #40 or #50 and gets dropped all of the time. These sites have different content, but I used the same SE positioning techniques when I built them + there are lots of links out there for both and they both get lots of hits. The above URLs are of course not the actual ones. Thanks for any help.
Paul Hall

[troels nybo nielsen]

Welcome to Webmaster World, Paul.

My own experiences with different extensions are very limited. I hope other members with more experiences in this field will chime in.

It is certainly trivial for a search engine to let the extension be part of the algorithm if they want to.

My limited experiences suggest the possibility that some search engines may give a website a (slight) handicap if its content does not seem to be of the kind that the extension suggests.

An .info extension would suggest an informational website. But if the content is actually commercial it is imaginable that a search engine might be able to identify it as such and then choose to degrade it slightly.

But this is all speculation for my part.

[OddDog]

I am not aware of any issues on .name, .biz, .info ect ...

But on national searchers such as .es, .de ect .. the issue is not the ccTLD but the location of the hosting service that has an impact on SERPS.

[nuevojefe]

as far as .biz goes we've had great success. Other country specific tlds are ok too with proper location hosting.

[encyclo]

Search engines don't much care whether you've got a .com, .net or a .biz - however searchers do. In particular, .biz has been a flop with the public, coming across as sleazy and cheap. No serious business uses a .biz, and many people won't buy from a .biz either.

So, you might get a good place in the SERPS, but it might not help your sales much. As always, YMMV.

[ogletree]

It could hurt to have a non .com .net .org because people may not link to it. I'm sure .co.uk does fine and some other country domains. Mainly the .cc .biz .info those kinds of things there is a chance of somebody not linking to you because of that.

[tedster]

That's a good point, ogletree, and I never focused on it before. There are certain prejudices associated with the johnny-come-lately extensions and they will be around for a while longer. I can see that being a problem with some potential link partners.