SEO Benefits Between .Com and Everything Else

This will probably be a controversial post as the topic has certainly been controversial. SearchMetrics.com published an article that took a look at the SEO benefits of .com vs every other extension. Now Google has always said there is no difference and Matt Cutts has debunked the new gtld crowd that said they would have a benefit. Matt wrote on his Google + in May 2012:

Matt Cutts

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I read a post by someone offering new top-level domain (TLDs). They made this claim: “Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.”Sorry, but that’s just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.

lsauer.com wrote:

Technically, it is not sensible to a priori discredit certain domains based on their domain extension. So far no recent evidence exists, from any search-engine company to penalize either of .info, .biz, .com, .org, .net, .name domain extensions or weigh them differently.

Rand Fishkin wrote an article on MOZ.com and included the image below which looked at ranking elements.

Here is a community discussion on Moz.com where members disagree on whether or not extension matters.

Back to SearchMetrics.com

SearchMetrics.com wrote:

You should be aware that SEO encompasses many things including high quality content, organically placed keywords, link building, the speed of the website, and a host of other things. However, a .com—instead of other options—is also great SEO fodder. It helps with “brandability” because let’s face it: a .com looks more authoritative, is more common, and is more popular than any other option. It is memorable – our minds are wired to think “dot com”!

They also included an infographic: