The very early stages of the release of “new” TLD’s (Top Level Domains) began at the end of 2012 and early 2013, when companies were given the opportunity — for the very first time — to apply for these new TLDs.

At that time mammoth companies were purchasing large volumes of TLDs, for example, Google bought .google, .docs, .youtube, and tons more. When the media released the massive price that they doled out — US$185,000 — we wrote this off to an interesting anomaly.

What we didn’t know then was that there would be a second phase to the release of these TLDs. At the very end of 2013 the second round of new domain names were released and every month in 2014 and so far in 2015, more and more of these exciting domain extensions have been released on the market for public purchase.

There are still hosts of new extensions scheduled for release, and as a result the possibilities for targeted domain names has completely re-opened. The pricing is the same as the .com, .info etc that we know and love.

As each TLD goes on the market it has to await the designated 60-day “sunrise” period. During this window, trademark holders have the opportunity to register claims and lock down their protected words. An example would be Dell who most likely would want to lock down dell.computer or Amazon.com and may swiftly pick up amazon.book. These domains must still be registered, but trademark holders get first dibs on all new TLDs.

With all of Google’s algorithm changes in recent years, search engine optimisation experts were concerned as to how these new domains would be seen by Google. Would they rank in the search engines, for example, as easily as the traditional .com domain names that we have become accustomed to? This is a very real concern, as we know that having a website is only a small part of the puzzle of growing an online presence.

What every business owner wants is for their website to be seen by targeted visitors who are looking for their products or services. So how do these new domain extensions fare? Let’s take a look at some pros and cons.

Cons

What I find interesting here is that the cons are issues that affect ANY “new” domain name. For example, the age of a domain name affects how well the website on that name will rank in the search engines. These extended domain names like .vacations, .flowers etc are all relatively new in the scheme of things. However, any new .com domain will be affected in the very same way.

The other factor that affects the positioning of a website in the search engines is the number of inbound links to the site. Here again, whether a site is using .attorney or .com as a new domain and website, it will take some time to accumulate the inbound links.

So what are the positive reasons for using these new extensions?

Pros

Well, the keywords present in a given domain name have a great influence on where a site shows up in the search results (ranking). This is due to a number of things, but the main reason is a straight analysis of the words that make up the domain and how they compare to the search query typed in.

For example, let’s look at the domain www.jacksonville.attorney. This is very obviously a great match for the search term “jacksonville attorney”, and that will directly affect how the site shows up. I checked this today and it is most definitely on the first page of Googles results for the term.

Now, an important fact to remember here is that the ultimate goal of a search engine is to show sites that the user finds most useful. How Google is able to track which site the user finds meets their needs is to track which one of the results the users most click on among the page of results shown.

Quite often there are many similarities between the results on page one for a specific term. What the viewer sees is the domain name, a short description of what the site is about, and let’s face it, a domain name that is clearly about the right topic will be more likely to be chosen before one that is ambiguous. As a result, domains using the new domain extensions like .BAND, .DENTIST, .LAWYER, etc will most definitely stand out.

The truth is that search engines use a number of factors to determine which sites they will show and the order in which to show them. Selecting the right domain for your business will definitely have an impact on this. These newly available domain extensions offer a much larger selection of great domains and make your task of choosing the right one for you much easier than in the past.