Moving a Com/Net/Org to a .Asia

[RedBar]

This is a question my company board has asked me several times over the years and I obviously have no idea to the answer. The majority of our realworld production is in Asia with sales on a global basis.

Google definitely favours com/net/org over all other gTLDs mostly due to the sheer weight of .com registrations however .asia is a gTLD therefore should surely be given the same level of recognition when it comes to generic search results, or is it?

I ask since there is the possibility of our companies going through a re-branding over the next couple of years, literally we want to bring all our names under the same www branding roof.

Has anyone here moved a corporate, or even personal, brand from a .com/net/org to another gTLD and not lost any, or very little, ranking in the Google SERPs? I specifically ask about Google since we have tested a small .asia site and it ranked extremely well in ALL search engines except for Google. This was over a period of 6 months.

We have the name in both .com and .asia.

I guess this will ultimately boil down to "Can i get example.asia to rank as well as example.com"?

Any thoughts or insights?

[goodroi]

Can .asia rank as well? Yes but it's easier to use a .com domain.

There are many small benefits to using a .com domain like consumers often assuming that is your URL. If a journalist is writing an article and they link back to you, they might assume you are .com & link to the .com version. Some older online forms don't recognize the newer tlds. There are just many small benefits being .com

Specifically speaking about Google. Keeping it as simple as possible works best and that means using a .com domain.

[Dimitri]

If you have the .com, don't bother with other extension. Also, people are in use of seeing domain name in .com , if they see something.asia, there is a risk some do not realize it's a domain name.

So personally , I would stick with the .com even if you target Asian market. However, if you taget Japan, China, Korea, etc... you might consider getting the ccTLD of these countries.

But again, I am old school, so to me anything beyond .com and ccTLD are too fancy to be serious :)

[RedBar]

if they see something.asia, there is a risk some do not realize it's a domain name.

Interestingly, in my global trade, much of the processing/production of our widgets is done in Asia even when the raw materials are from other continents, most, if not all, major buyers know this and are used to this fact and would have no problem with a .asia

My quandry was whether G would actually rank it as an "equal" to .com?

Anyway, the decision has been made, we're going to go for it and simply see what happens ... I'll let you know by Xmas:-)

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world

Bets anyone?

[Robert Charlton]

RedBar, I agree with goodroi that, with regard to Google, .asia should rank as well as .com. The gTLDs are treated equally by Google. That said, as both goodroi and Dimitri mention, there are potential downsides to the .asia TLD from the point-of-view of users, journalists, etc.

To mitigate (most of) these, IMO you absolutely must retain the .com and keep it 301ed to the .asia.

My quandry was whether G would actually rank it as an "equal" to .com?

Yes, to add to the reassurances already give... all other things being equal... Google would treat both of them equally in search.

The biggest risk you run, I'm thinking (and I've seen this happen more than once) is that, at some point, someone in your company is going to get the bright idea that they can save $20/yr or whatever it becomes by dropping the .com... and that it will get picked up by a domain squatter, who eventually might sell it back to the company for many thousands of dollars.

By starting out with the .asia gTLD, I should mention, you turn that domain variant into an albatross that you will need to carry around for a long while, whether the human recognition factor works out favorably for you or not.