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Preference to .net and .com

We've heard about .org and .edu, what about .net and .com?

         

ppeter

3:19 pm on Feb 20, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Same site, same server, same PR, link popularity...

Will Google look at the site any different if it is on a .com or a .net address?

There has been some suggestion that Google gives preference to .org and .edu so is there any preference for .com over .net of vice versa do you think?

mbauser2

5:15 am on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think both such "suggestions" are useless rumors spread by various ill-informed morons grasping at straws because they can't accept that college sophomores produce better webpage than ill-informed morons.

Google has no special preference for any TLD.

GoogleGuy

5:59 am on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I wouldn't have put it quite like mbauser2, but they're right: there's no preference for TLDs.

rfgdxm1

2:53 pm on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



It should be noted that today anyone and his cousin today can register a .com, .net or .org. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to give preference to one unrestricted TLD than another. Everyone can't register a .edu, so at least in theory giving preference to that TLD might make some sense.

IITian

3:49 pm on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



... because they can't accept that college sophomores produce better webpage than ill-informed morons.

Large part of the reason of popularity of college sophomores' pages seems to be the PR they inherit from the university through link.

More Traffic Please

5:33 pm on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



.gov and .edu sites have been much more prevelent since mid November. They are much more likely to be a large authority type site that Google really started flooding the serps with after Florida. IMO, there are no brownie points given to any TLD over the other.

Dalmatian

5:37 pm on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have .info site which is way infront of similar .org site (same one word domain, same topic, 1 point difference in page rank).
So I guess my opinion on this is clear :)

SyntheticUpper

7:09 pm on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Google certainly appears to favour .ac sites. This is not surprising given the education / background of their employees, who may be involved in the search quality evaluation process. One of my hobby sites was linked to from the .ac homepage of an Ivy League professor. It gets crawled every day.

Added:

I think it is worth adding that there is a potential risk having serps evaluated by a top 1% IQ group. I hope that Google aren't daft, and use a large and disparate team of people to evaluate serps (WW members? :) But a latent bias towards intellectual sites would be understandable.

What has been notable throughout this entire Florida; Austin; Brandy 64; Brandy?; Brandy 216; where the hell went Brandy?; update, is that hard science sites don't move in the serps.

hutcheson

8:26 pm on Feb 21, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>hard science sites don't move in the serps.

Hmm. Perhaps hard science sites don't do the sort of aggressive artificial-link-generation and hyper-keyword-stuffing that characterizes viagra sales sites.

madman21

12:27 pm on Feb 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



show me a .mil that was filtered with the recent updates

rfgdxm1

5:41 pm on Feb 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>show me a .mil that was filtered with the recent updates

Please stickymail me the URL of a .mil site that is heavily SEOed this would likely happen?

SyntheticUpper

8:33 pm on Feb 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Please stickymail me the URL of a .mil site that is heavily SEOed this would likely happen?

Your point being?

Certainly, if RXFDM (dextromethorph*n) is searched for in Google only 772 pages are available.

IMHO, if you maintain a site on such a minority subject, it's hard to see how you are qualified to comment on search relevance in general. Some of us are working with 500,000+ potential competing pages.

p.s. and check out the US Army's new online game - very, very nicely positioned :) O.K. - it's on a .com, but...

rfgdxm1

11:59 pm on Feb 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



What is the relevance that *my* sites are on a narrow topic? Yeah, I concede this. But where are the heavily SEOed .mil sites?

SyntheticUpper

12:12 am on Feb 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I think perhaps I was a bit harsh: too late to edit - so I withdraw.

But by their nature, and the sheer number of employees providing input, .ac .mil .gov .edu sites are mega-sites. The biggest problem is probably controlling the size of their content - not building it.

In an index with a bias towards semantics (which I think we've got now) these sites cover their bases almost by default. In other words - they don't need 'optimising'

There is a large number of small science / maths sites (not mega sites - 50 or so pages) that didn't budge an inch since November 2003.

But a large number of small commerce sites moved by hundreds of places.

That's the observation.

Krapulator

12:20 am on Feb 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I have always suspected that incoming links from .edu sites are weighed more heavily in the algo than other incoming links.

hutcheson

2:20 am on Feb 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Personally, I think Google gives a boost to sites with a parchment-colored page background.

I suppose it's possible that there's a correlation between garish backgrounds and incestuously-linked doorway pages on the one hand, and small e-promotional-for-e-tailing sites -- while a different set of correlations prevails with .edu sites, and Google is just weighing links, just like their spokespeople and websites say.

The difference between physics professors and e-advertisers is that the former link to each other, and the latter link only to their own mirrors. And the whole point of page rank is not to see who thinks most highly of himself, but who is most highly thought of by others. And thus physics professors have more stature than viagra peddlers: which I have a hard time thinking is a serious fault in the algorithm.