Breaking: The Register – Building your site on a new gTLD may provide SEO benefits

One of the big questions in everyone’s mind surrounding the new gTLDs is how they will fare in search engines like Google and Bing. Yesterday The Register took a deep dive into two SEO studies that were done on the new gTLDs that show there could be some meaningful SEO benefits to putting a site on a new gTLD.

“If you want to get higher up Google’s search rankings, it turns out that using a new dot-thing domain – such as .guru or .ninja – may give you the edge.” (Source – The Register)

One of the studies they examined looked at the new .BERLIN domain extension and compared it to Germany’s own .DE to see if a website could get an edge ranking for terms with “Berlin” in them using the new TLD, here are the results:

“dot-Berlin domains consistently did better than the same domains under the German dot-de top-level domain, or the ubiquitous dot-com, when people where web searching for things in Berlin.” (Source – The Register)

Of course Matt Cutts from Google was quick to comment on the article saying:

“Sorry, but that’s just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.” (Source – Matt Cutts)

So did the Register try to make a story out of this or do these studies show an edge that new gTLD owners will have that Google doesn’t want to see get out of control? I personally think it’s still far too early to know and these studies will need a lot more data before they can convince me of anything.

What do you think? Will new gTLDs be an SEO dream or is it just a bunch of media hype?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton