It’s one of the most commonly asked questions from beginning webmasters across the net but one that no one seems to have a solid answer to.

The Question: From the top TLDs, which domain extension has superior SEO Value? Are they weighted equal in the eyes of Google?

The Theory: COM Good – INFO Bad

The most common response is probably that the SEO benefit of .com domains outweigh other TLDs. And, contrastly, .info domains are at the bottom of the spectrum, often considered to be spammers choice due to their cheap price tag, thereby making them equally disliked by Google and other search engines.

The Author’s Opinion

I think its up for debate but from what I’ve seen personally, .com is only truly superior for branding purposes. As far as SEO goes, they’re all pretty much the same. I’d still consider getting a good .com over a great .info because I like to always hold onto the idea of branding a site in case it takes off.

I had one domain I never thought would do well but a month or two later it was pulling $1000/day with little to no work and it stayed that way for 6-months. If it had been a brandable domain from the get go, it could have taken more hold and maybe be doing even better today. Alas, it left the Search Engines as fast as it got there and was never heard from again. Thanks, MSN algorithm change!

But, because Google, The King of Search Engines is also King of Secrets, nobody knows the answer to the forever weighed question.

The Experiment: A Live Study

The only real way to find out the answer to an ongoing debate is to introduce some empirical data into the equation. But, fact is, running tests like this take time and patience, two things most online marketers often lack!

But, the owner of the SEO Empire blog decided to run a little experiment of his own!

I’ve taken the liberty of pulling a little data for our readers. You can see the entire experiment at the following link…

http://seoempire.org/seo-test-11-com-vs-org-vs-net-vs-info/

The site author states his Google rankings from the test:

…all with the same content put out approximately the same time, same wordpress blog template, etc. Only major variable being the domain TLD.

The experiment began during the end of July, 2009…

The Results: You be the Judge

All things remaining unchanged, we might have something to go off of, the only real variable left up to debate would then be the varying dates each domain was 1st published to the web and possible effects it may have on duplicate content penalties.

Overall results could have been more solid if all domain content had been published online at the exact same time, not days apart.

Also, the test doesn’t take into account possible backlinks and other off-page factors that might be tugging at the strings.

Now, 2 months later (Oct 2009), the scoring has changed…

Final Analysis

The one thing that appears remotely solid is that .com seems to be holding the top spot which is on queue with what the majority of SEO hobbyists and professionals alike, might expect.

If I based my opinion off of this test, it may result in a little added bump to my previous instinctual tendency to lean toward .coms but, not so much that I’d go all in and bet my whole stack of chips on it.

It would need quite a lot more testing to be 100% certain, a test group and all the angles covered, something this single test didn’t do. Still, its one step in the right direction.

Digging Deeper

I decided to do a little further testing on this just to be sure…

Upon running a backlink analysis comparing the 4 domains, here is what we found.

Number of Backlinks to each TLD

This would explain it pretty well IMHO.

The .com domain had backlinks pointing to it as early as January 2008, probably by a previous domain owner or some other unknown event. The .net domain picked up a link early on from another site and picked up a few more a month later and the .info never received a link at all from anyone, ever. Never ever.

Which raises another important point…

Brandability

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, the real value of .com domains is the brandability that comes along with it.

Most web authors, bloggers and everyday Joe’s across social sites, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of ‘em, have become comfy with .coms. So, when they link, they link to .coms.

With Google, backlinks are the most important factor of all and if I had to bet the farm on any theory, that would be my take.

So, rather than worrying about which spamtastic domain extension you want to drop in your cart next time you visit godaddy, just remember, get something brandable. The price tag may be a couple dollars more but, the payoff may be well worth it.

“You say that autoblogging will increase my sites PR due to lots of incoming links. How does WPC do this? i mean, build the incoming links? wouldn`t i have to do this manually?”

ANSWER:

Well, WordPress Cloaker currently comes with a few bonus plugins:

1. 1. WP Tube
2. 2. WP Feeder
3. 3. WP Scraper
4. 4. WP Spinner

These are all content generating plugins that help you build any number of pages targeting any number of niches or keywords.

So, here’s how it breaks down as far as link juice and PR…

1. You need inbound links

So, how do you get those?

Well, there are lots of ways, some easy and some not so easy…

The Hard Way

An example of good backlinks that are hard to get would be to manually find sites to partner with you and send each person an email asking for reciprocal link exchange, and other old school methods.

The Easier Way

But, nowadays you have lots of easier options, some automated, others more semi-automatic or work intensive.

An example would be to go to blogs and make comments and include a link back to your blog or web site. Sounds great but you still have to find sites that don’t use the no-follow attributes on their links or you get no Google love at all from a lot of work.

A couple samples of good high PR sites that don’t use no-follow would be from some .edu sites (hard to find but VERY good)

see below for a small sample of good ones:

http://www.csdhead.cs.cmu.edu/blog/2009/07/30/at-last-useful-social-networking

http://diva.sfsu.edu/blog/04-20-2009/using-content-outside-of-diva

http://www.sft.edu/blog/2009/07/15/so-much-for-type-casting/

http://blog.axehandle.org/2009/01/writing-about-black-panthers.html

http://connect.rhodes.edu/blog/tyler/

http://apps.career.colostate.edu/blog/archive/2009/09/09/telluride-film-festival-inspiration.aspx#feedback

An Even EASIER WAY

But, there are better ways, more automated that don’t require much work. ONE of those would be to use some of the great WordPress SEO plugins you can find for free out there.

One I like a lot is the Onlywire plugin. You simply setup a free account with Onlywire and create your accounts with the various sites that it submits your blog posts to for you.

Note: Takes about 30-45 minutes of work but well worth it!

Once you’ve finished the account creation process, the Onlywire plugin automatically submits each post (or a percentage of your posts, so you don’t over do it) to lots of different social and web 2.0 sites.

Keep in mind that each of these are high PR sites and by submitting your posts to them, you are creating some nice, quality backlinks to your blog posts.

Here’s a full list:

Ask
Bebo
Bibsonomy
Blinklist
Connotea
FINALIZE
Delicious
Digg
FINALIZE
Diigo
Faves
Google Bookmarks
Jumptags
Mister Wong
Mixx
FINALIZE
Multiply
Newsvine
Plaxo
Propeller
Reddit
FINALIZE
Simpy
Slashdot
FINALIZE
Technorati
FINALIZE
Tumblr
Twitter
Yahoo Bookmarks

…All this on auto pilot each time you submit a new post!

The PR coming in to a single post from these sites adds up and of course gets distributed to your domain.

2. Next you need to automate the backlinks

To trigger onlywire’s magic, you need lots of new posts created daily. This is where The WordPress Cloaker Suite of tools steps up to lend a hand.

These tools will easily allow you to setup a handful of sites all posting 1-5 new posts per day on auto-pilot, just the way you want it. With the help of the Onlywire WordPress plugin, each of those posts will be automatically submitted to all of the above sites and generate tons of backlinks for you.

You now have backlink building totally hand free that willl help your PR increase dramatically over time with nearly zero effort.

Finally, WordPress Cloaker comes into the picture allowing us to redirect visitors anywhere we want. We want our visitors to see a perfectly orchestrated landing page, not a bunch of blog posts that aren’t going to convert or directly make us any money.

But, yes, all in all, a very automated way of handling backlink building.

I’ve often considered Google to be much like a credit bureau.

They look at every imaginable condition and apply a positive + or negative – mark for each, and end up with a final “credit” score that they apply to your sites.

This is your Google Credit Score and it comes about through a very systematic approach.

By setting your site on their “desk”, you’re essentially asking for a loan and the Google Loan Officer is going to run a quick background check to determine whether you qualify.

So, here goes. Here are some possible things the Google Creditor may watch for:

1. New domains – Age is important. New, fresh domain names receive only limited love.

2. Questionable TLD’s – Certain TLDs attract spam. .info domains, for example, are inexpensive. Cheap, in fact. And, the money-conscious blackhat marketer has purchased hundreds of thousands of these domains at 99¢ for the purpose of spamming the search engines. There is speculation that Google *might* give a minus mark for certain TLD’s, such as this, but the verdict is still out.

Personally, I don’t buy it. But, that’s for you to decide.

3. Too much, Too fast – So, sir, you have written 500 new articles on ‘Viagra in the last 24 hours, eh? Very impressive. Let me give you a Gold Star!”

NOT!

It often amazes me to think about. I’ve made similar poor judgment calls myself many times in the past. But, Google is in the business of indexing quality content. If you want on their good side, do NOT post a 500 page deep site in 5 seconds and expect to not wear a big red, written-in-lipstick sign on your forehead that says, “SPAMMER!”

Anyway, I’m going to have to end it here as I have a lot of work to do. There is a new video coming out later today that will cover all the udpate changes to WordPress Cloaker.

Oh yeah, there is an update for WordPress Cloaker coming out within the next 24-hours with lots of new features…

P. S. I’ve really wanted to write an article on the Google as a Creditor for awhile now, so I’ll plan on adding to this article over time… I know I’m leaving it hanging there a bit for now.


Note: Click thumbnails below to see full size images....

Here is a common mistake:

Notice the space between words in the keyword phrase, ie., “keyword phrase” instead of keyword+phrase…

Here is the “right” way to do it:

Notice that you must have a + between words in a phrase.

Another way to find the exact phrases on Yahoo is to go here and do a search:

http://news.yahoo.com/rss

Next, Scroll down to the text field area titled:

“Create your own RSS news feeds”

Now, do a search for your phrase…

You’ll see a page with this kind of junk:

Don’t worry about that. Just look at the URL of this page…

Use that URL for your feed URL and you’re all set!

Easiest though is to just swap “tax+debt” for any keyword phrase of your liking…

Note: See highlighted yellow in the photo below.

See below solutions:

You can use the meta noarchive tag which will instruct search engine spiders NOT to create a cached version of the page.

All Purpose No Cache Meta Tags:

Google Specific No Cache Meta Tags:

Yahoo Specific No Cache Meta Tags:

MSN Specific No Cache Meta Tags:

TEOMA Specific No Cache Meta Tags:

I’ve used the All-purpose solution from above without much problem for years.

How important is doing this? In my opinion, VERY! I do it 100% of the time…