How effective are non-.com top level domains?

The SEO view is they are treated the same as any other gTLD (which is good). There's no additional benefit to having a certain keyword in there, e.g. somesite.london won't add any relevance for "London", which isn't bad but some people may assume it would.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you are doing a solid job with your content people will end up on your site. I have found that people rarely type in a specific domain it's much more tangentially searched through an email referral or social share.

We are on .co (ghostit.co) and it has not affected us at all. JonH is right there is no additional benefit.

My email address is a domain on .email which I registered over 4 years ago. That's how long that gTLD has been around. Even today people I share my mail address with often ask whether that's even a valid address at all or in other cases finish entering the address with "interesting".

Adoption of these gTLD's is very, very limited.

There's also another complication; yet again related to mail handling. Some web forms don't even allow these newer gTLDs, most likely due to incorrect regular expressions (c/p stackoverflow anyone?) like checking for length or a (deprecated) list of known tld's.

I'm no expert on SEO, so I'll leave that to someone else.

I really don't think it matters that much. If this is what's keeping you from selling your product to people, then it's time to just make a decision and move on. The amount of value you'll get by improving your domain name right now is tiny.

They can be quite effective, but I would hesitate using the extension as part of your name. It will add extra complexity to describing and marketing your business. Generally I recommend always including your full company/product name BEFORE the extension. Things I keep in mind when looking for a domain:

1. If you can get the .com, do it.
2. If not, get another extension. I'll usually check .io/.co first, than .org/.net. If nothing is available, I'll circle back and come up with another name/variant.
3. If you're going after a particular keyword, make sure your target keyword is at the beginning of the domain name.
4. If your name/keyword is unavailable, try adding a modifier like "pro" or "king" to the end, and follow steps 1–2 again.
5. Don't be afraid to email someone who has your desired domain but hasn't developed yet. Everything has a price.

@mtso You should log out of your account then log back in, and connect your email address when you do, so you can get email notifications when people reply to your comments.

I bought a .co when I started my site about a year ago, but since then the .com luckily became available and I bought it. Will switch at some point where traffic becomes significant (if ever lol).

Depends on your market. If your audience is more technical, you can usually get away with non-standard TLDs.

The public has already been educated on .com so I highly recommend you go for that first.

Our business started out with a .io, however 9 months in we decided to switch to a .com instead. No regrets, glad we did decide to switch.

For some reason, the general public still hasn't come to terms with newer TLD's and we found that our audience, which include a of technical businesses, simply didn't trust the .io name and felt "weird" (for the lack of a better word) about it.

I don't think SEO is really an issue anymore, but it simply looks better to have a .com name. I don't like this, but I really do believe it's true.

I use a .plus tld for my blog, but I knew I would mostly just link to my site anyway. I think there is some awareness with the general public, but it's for a personal blog with technical content.

As for SEO, I know Google no longer cares about the TLD, and I have multiple sites that don't seem to be affected by the newer TLD.

Here's my 2 cents:

TL/DR if .com wasn't available I'd usually go for .net.

The long version:

Developing SEO for a TLD domain is a long-term investment - perhaps 5 to 20 years say.

Your licensing the domain from a registrar. You investment is dependent on how solid that registrar is.

On that view, the original publicly available top-level domains are .com, .net and .org should be most trusted.

.org is not really meant for commerce so if .com wasn't available I'd go for .net .

Because I'm British, .co.uk works for me and is probably also solid. Also, if I had a legal dispute I'd prefer any court case to be held on my home turf, that is a UK court.

On the other hand, how solid is the future of .io ? From a long-term view, it looks like there is political risk there:

https://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/the-dark-side-of-io-how-the-u-k-is-making-web-domain-profits-from-a-shady-cold-war-land-deal/

For developer focused products .io seems to work just as well. Certain domains play well with the TLD. For instance, play.it advertises heavily on FM radio, it's obviously working out for them.

Famous non .coms -

O.co
About.Me
Goo.gl
Bit.ly

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