.museum

What should I do if I move from .com to .museum?

[nvision]

Hi there. Not sure if my mind is vague being Monday morning but I'll ask this one - a friend of mine has a .com he wants to change to .museum. How will this work for the SEO side of it - should I keep the .com with a splash page and a "please click here for the new site" linking to the .museum, shifting the rest of the site over to .museum, or what? Please advise and many thanks for the help!

[Lisa]

Well, I would alias it. I would have a dot com with the same name. You could put a 301 redirect on the frontpage and if you see the address is .COM then redirect to the .MUSEUM. Brand the graphics and everything on the site as domain.MUSEUM. People and search engines will now now you are not a dot com.

sub-note: (Many email regular expressions will not properly validate such a long extension. So you may have a problem filling out web forms)

[nvision]

Cool, thanks.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Also bear in mind that your URL's are longer, dont make them too long on the new site or you might trigger some sorta penalty ;)

[EliteWeb]

Would a .museum work as a keyword for the domain name? Are ending of domain names included in the process?

[Lisa]

museum may be a keyword. It is seperated by white noise "." & "/" but search engines may start to ignore it like they do COM. However I think the value of the TLD is worth it if you actually have a museum.

Is museum in .museum counted as a keyword. I would say yes, but it depends on the search engine.

[nvision]

This one actually happens to be a Spanish museum and would have its respective Spanish name, so whether the .museum is registered by search engines or not wouldn't (shouldn't?) be much of an issue.

What kind of penalty, B?