What's the IH opinion on domains?
We all know these days all the ideal and less-than-ideal .com domains have gone.
What's the community opinion on next best options?
Should I use an alt TLD? eg. domain.io
Should I stick with .com and go for a variation? eg. getdomain.com, domainhq.com
What about 'clever' domains? eg. doma.in
Also I'm wondering if alt TLD's have different 'weights' in terms of SEO? Importantly: is there any research that can be linked to?
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We originally wanted a .com a few years ago when we just got started. But it was taken (domain parking) so we went with a .co and decided we'd buy the .com a few years down the road when the project has proven to be successful.
Seems everything was fine until last year when an affiliate of ours actually bought the .com domain.
Then he started redirecting the .com to his affiliate link. And then he started getting recurring commissions from us (we run a SaaS business so monthly/yearly subscriptions) ... simply because of the .com domain. I know because he doesn't do any active promotions on his end.
In the end I bought the .com domain from him for a lot more than I could have just by contacting the previous owner.
I never would have expected that there are still quite a number of people who would type a .com right after our brand name. I always thought that it's just easier to type in our brand name in the browser and off to Google they go, and our site would be the first site that showed up.
Turns out I was wrong.
I think once you have some mild success with your project, you should consider getting a .com
As you grow your brand, the more important it is to get the .com of your brand name.
Some people don't type it, you can ctrl+enter ...
That's a special .com has that others won't ever have
It's one less click than search
Also on some mobile keyboards there is the '.com' as one button but no other
(I wonder what other magic like that is around)
As a user .com vs something else, the other one would always seem less genuine (unless local business with country domain)
@paul1664
Good one the ctrl+enter
Ah yes, I ctrl+enter all the time.
I usually dismiss the
.comthing as "who cares" but this kinda gives things a new perspective.Thanks for sharing 🎉
I'm glad you managed to work out your differences. It sounds like sneaky behaviour.
The dotcom I want is available but for many thousands of dollars. I like your strategy of waiting until I see success before investing.
I'd say there is no point in really being too fancy with domains extensions. Except if it's a part of your brand, but for most services, it wouldn't be the case.
Also depends on the industry you are targeting. Most "classical" industries might still expect a good old .com . In some cases, having a different extension may cause doubt in the mind of your prospects (e.g. older crowd).
We have chosen deliberately a .io domain for our product (keypup.io) as it targets software developers - so being a bit more modern seemed appropriate.
All in all - probably not something that will make or break a buy from your market anyways. But you have to keep in mind your marketing and your brand tone of voice when making your choice.
Hey, I'm that older crowd and that's why I'm asking!
But you're right - it probably won't break my marketing these days. The world has moved on from the Paul Graham essay mentioned in another post.
I think it depends on who your target market is and what marketing/sales channels you're using to promote. If the target market is a non-technical/not as tech-savvy audience, I'd stay far away from alt TLDs or clever domains because some people still don't know that .io or .so can be part of a url. It also helps to have a .com if you're promoting your product somewhere offline (e.g. phone call or word of mouth etc.) to help make it more memorable.
I think it depends but I tend to think that it's not super important unless you're aiming to be a really big business.
If you aim to be mostly in some sort of niche than I think you can get away with something else than .com.
Paul Graham has a good essay on this topic here
I like to be creative with domains for example with our company domain https://nichemat.es/ but I don't expect to promote it or get a lot of traffic except direct link shares so it's not worth the 10x price imo.
I remember the PG essay from back in the day. It's part of the reason for this post. My view is having a .com is not quite as relevant as back then since people are more familiar with alternatives. But you still can't beat The Real Thing!
Yeah it's true and this kinda ties into what other people have said that some people are more tech savy or a lot of traffic will be direct linking or you rank high enough in SEO if your name is good and the other domain is just parked and not a real company / anything content heavy behind it etc.
But def losing out on something. So long story short I agree haha.
I'm thinking that with clubhouse, their importance will get bigger, people in rooms often mention recommendations and domains and having something shorter really helps.
They could grow their audience by one by letting me in!
I think it depends on what is available and what your project is for. More techy crowds are always more accepting of the alternate domains. While the less ticky crowd sometimes get weary of them
This is true because normal people mostly have no clue how the internet works and how expensive .com domains really are haha so they just expect anything they know or have heard of to have the
.com.Most of the time this might be true but only because startups make up their names as they go 😁
So true. It is super nice when you can get a great .com though.
Not my site, but I like using ExpireDomains.net to find amazing domain names. The have tons and tons of lists of the expire domains from almost every TLD. I have gotten some great domains from it, even some quality .coms
Makes me think of this haha
There aren’t SEO differences unless you buy a ccTLD domain. Exception: Google treats some ccTLDs as gTLDs (like .co or .io for example). Here’s the list.
Ah... good to hear about the ccTLD's - I have the .co. Thanks!
Hi Paul,
We have come up with more than 300 good dot com domains that are still available for normal price, some of them are just 6 letters. I would like to know whether you will buy our dot com domain name suggestions according to your requirements packed in pdf file for 49 USD
I'm happy with my .co at the moment. The .com is available but I'm not prepared to invest just yet.
As for domain suggestions: there are lots of ways to do this for free so $49 might be a bit hard for me (an indie) to justify. An agency or SME might bite though. I see a lot of 'premium domain' resellers selling good domains for ~$1000 so $49 might be a sweet spot.
Thanks for the response
I've been trying to decide the same thing.
In the end, I went with .app, because all the .coms I wanted were gone.
I think .coms are more memorable, but if you end up having to add a modification to the start/end that you have to explain every time anyway, then that benefit becomes less significant ("no no no, it's get myApp.com, not myApp.com" etc.).
I very rarely type a URL into the address bar anyway, and I'm sceptical about google favouring .coms, so I'm hoping that it doesn't really matter anyway.
I was thinking along the same lines. It's easier to say "domain.co" or "domain.io" than "getdomain.com".
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.
Thanks! The .app and .dev HSTS requirements are interesting and worth seeing if Google apply any bias. I'm sticking with .co for now.