How Will The New ICANN TLD’s Affect SEO?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Aug 10, 2011
A couple of months ago, ICANN announced that personalized domain extensions will become available in the near future. Up to this, domain name registration was quite straightforward as there were only a standard few extensions to choose from (like .com, .net and .org), but this announcement has shaken things up a bit. The new domain name extensions will potentially expand the range of domains available to brands and companies.
New TLD’s will be exclusively for the wealthy.. for now
One limiting factor of these new domain extensions is that the price per application is approximately $185,000, which will only really be affordable to large corporations and global brands. However, it is likely that these costs will drop in the future, just like the domains .com, .co.uk and .ie dropped in price in the last decade. With this in mind, what effect could this have on the SEO industry, we wonder?
How about using keywords in domain names? Inputting SEO keywords when creating domains could become a big trend. So if we were really quick, we could register “online.marketing” or “business.blogging” for ourselves. And we could use this idea for branding too, by registering “silicon.cloud”. Fun times!
The SEO revolution is coming
Will search engines take into account these new levels of domain names? SEO takes account of .com vs .co.uk depending on region, and we wonder if this will be applied to the new domains in a similar way. We wonder if bigger brands who can afford the new domains will be given more authority in search results.
Will businesses make more use of subdomains when they have control of an entire domain extention? For example, we could use blog.siliconcloud, seo.siliconcloud and home.siliconcloud to split up various sections of our website – but how would this mess with our SEO rankings? Our guess is that with options like these available, a revolution in SEO is on the way and Google will be making some major changes. Will SEO experts have to learn a whole new set of skills? Time will only tell.
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