SEO: dot.Net versus dot.Com

Philbert

Hi folks,

I need to acquire a gTLD for an ecommerce shop that will be trading in Ireland and globally. All the gTLD’s are already taken, however the dot.Net is for sale for approximately €1000. The dot.Com is currently parked on a bog standard advertising landing page and will be next to impossible to buy given that its owners can’t be contacted (these particular squatters are notoriously difficult to contact) and even if we could, I’m certain the price for the domain would be prohibitive.

So... If we commit to running the ecommerce shop on the .Net TLD are we capable of ranking the same in Google as if we had a .Com instead? In other words, will we be at an immediate disadvantage by using the .Net from an SEO point of view, or does Google even care? Should we just choose a different .Com instead? <-Really dont want to have to do this.

This site will be all SEO driven, we dont expect much direct traffic (apart from repeat visitors) and we understand that we would lose a certain amount of traffic to the .Com landing page from people who type in the address directly and incorrectly.

From the little bit or research I have done I cannot find any big/successful ecommerce shops using the .Net TLD and ranking in the top 10 for any keywords that I tried. Perhaps that has answered my question?!

Please advise.

Thanks.

Philbert.

Moonstar

Have you really exhausted all the .com possibilities?

Does the domain name have to be an exact representation of the business name?

I don't think there is any intrinsic SEO disadvantage to .net apart from those you have already described, but there may be an additional marketing disadvantage in terms of customer perception when they see the ".net", although it's difficult to quantify this in real terms.

If you are trying to have many of your search engine keywords in the domain name then I wouldn't worry about that aspect too much, you can still rank for those keywords from the content of pages/incoming links etc.

notnem

There is no difference between the .net or .com domains in SEO terms. Godaddy offer a service to contact domain registers to organise a purchase. You choose a budget and they act on your behalf. I used this once and they contacted the owner and tried to negociate a purchase but our budget didn't stretch that far.

Hope this is helpful.

Pablo

http://www.spreadshirt.net/ is a successful enough enterprise. The use the .com/.de to seperate between locals. But still they have a shop on the .NET also.

If the .com is parked, maybe you can target some ads on that domain to gather those people who type in the URL incorrectly. Another thing that helps is if you can rank for say
[myshoponline.com] , even though your shop is at myshoponline.net. So people who can't find you via the .com are quite likely to do a search on google to see what has happened your shop.

Paul

Philbert

Thanks for your replies guys.

randomer

I see two problems with going for the dot net over the dot com.

1. The amount of traffic you would lose because because they assume the site is domain.com rather than domain.net.

2. If the dot com domain is currently parked, and the dot net site becomes successful, what is to stop the owner of the dot com site placing advertising to your competitors sites? Or what if they put up a new site offering similar services to you?