Is there any advantage or disadvantage to using .info domain names? They are certainly cheaper, but I'd like to know whether search engines or human users have known issues with them. For example, do search engines rank .com or .org lower than .info?
I am about to purchase forty or fifty domain names and I want some good info.
Any ideas or experience?
TLD has no effect on SEO except for local search. Since .info is a general TLD and not a country specific TLD using it will not have an impact on your rankings at all.
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I have both .ca and .com domains of my website. The website is meant for international audience, but it is important to be associated with Canada though. (the website is about Canadian immigration)
So the question is should I use .ca domain and 301 redirect .com visitors to .ca or vice versa and why?
In other words would it be harder to rank higher internationally with .ca domain?
I suppose it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link building with.
So the question is should I use .ca domain and 301 redirect .com
visitors to .ca or vice versa and why?
It's the same thing, depends on audience targeting. If you are targeting the outside from Canada, then .com is prefered. It's common logic. If you are targeting my country (Croatia) it would be prefered / good to put .hr domain up.
In other words would it be harder to rank higher internationally with
.ca domain?
Well, this is a tricky part. It depends on amount of SEO effort that you are going to put on page this page. But yes, it's true. It would be harder to rank higher with .ca domain.
I suppose it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link
building with.
It's true, it doesn't really matter which one you promote and do link building with, however... if your site is going for international audience, then .com is prefered. But, it's ok to use 301 redirect to your .com domain.
In seo , many factor is responsible for rank a website like Quality content,high and relevant back links,social signals. It doesn't really matter which one you promote but quality of submission is matter.
I think i would keep both toplevel-domains and use the hreflang tag in the header to show google which domain belongs to which location. That should fix the duplicate content issue and you should rank a little bit better (maybe, who knows). it's described here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
Usually the country domains get preferred within the country, so you would get a boost within Canada if you go with .CA. However in your case your audience is mostly from abroad, so perhaps if you do 3xx redirect from CA to COM would do you better service.
P.S.
Keep in mind that sometimes people who view the search results may prefer or trust domains associated with the country. But this has to be tested with your audience.
As you mentioned in your question the the website is meant for an international audience. SEO ranking aside the international audience will be much more used to the .com domain than the .ca TLD.
COM vs CA
As of today the TLD does not matter much as long as you are not using free TLDs that are often associated with scams (suck as .tk for example). In fact Google has explicitly mentioned that the TLD is often ignored and making a website about a museum using the .museum domain (yes it exists http://about.museum/) will not help you at all.
Search engines are actively trying to incorporate localization - the Russian search engine Yandex for example offers different results depending on the neighbourhood of the user. With this in mind it is important to decide whether local Canadians or the international audience is your primary target in order to future-proof your website.
Link Building & Promotion of a 301 Redirect
Another important question which you asked is whether it matters which website you promote (co or com). Technically there is almost no difference when it comes to the power of the accumulated links (which boost your search ranking), however you must have in mind that this could change any day.
Currently many black-hat SEOs link to short domain redirects and point these links to the websites that they want to rank. Google will inevitably find a way to penalize them, so I advice promoting the main website not the redirect.
Permanent (301) vs Temporary Redirect (302)
Additionally make sure to use a 301 redirect not a 302 or javascript redirect as they are completely different in the eyes of search engines.
I would make the .ca and .com point to the same site, but promote the .com domain as it's for a wide range of users. So the canonical address will be the .com but canadians will probably get the .ca one as google is prefering local content.
If your services are limited to Canada and you have multiple local stores in various cities, then .ca domain will help you to rank better in Canada search results.
If your customers spread across the globe then using .com is advisable. You are serving international customers and have just .ca domain doesn't make sense to the users as well search engines.
So if you are specific to one country, use country specific domains like .CA other wise use .COM for a global presence.
Would using one of the newer gTLD's have any adverse effect on SEO?
Good or bad are relative terms. Will the new gTLDs prevent your website from being indexed or crawled by search engines? Of course not.
Would it help or hurt you competitively? Depends what you are competing for.
If you are doing geographic specific services, then yes they are less effective that cTLDs.
But search engines are private companies and the owners are TLDs are private individuals, so the value ultimately comes from the market.
.io domains are good for tech because it's convention.
.biz is considered less that .com because one is considered the prime TLD target for a company name.
Without years of testing, observation and analysis you cannot possibly speculate on whether or not they will provide any extra value than any other TLD.
I don't think they will have an adverse effect on seo but don't expect them to have an advantage either. Big G mostly cares about the content quality, speed and that kind of stuff. Sometimes ccTLDs may have an advantage over gTLDs when a local search is performed but these are not ccTLDs, these are gTLS.
Check this out: https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/4VaWg4TMM5F
You can also check out my post on new gTLDs: http://big.info/2015/02/disadvantages-new-gtlds.html
Cheers
I have a somewhat specific question about Cloaking, I'm aware that this might be one of the worst things to do for SEO, however my client has a product that is due to legal reasons named differently in Germany, now this means based on the location of the visitor we have to change that name, therefore it has nothing to do with SEO at that point and we'd replace just the product name. Does anyone know if this affects SEO or knows about a technique to avoid this but still achieve our goal?
As long as you serve the same content to users as you would to search engines, then it is not cloaking. eg - for german IP addresses/users, they get xx, and any german search bots would too. Google mainly crawls from usa.
I am going to create a network with one domain, e.g. example.com then going to manage my websites in folders. Look below for example:
www.example.com/market
www.example.com/freebies
www.example.com/personalblog
www.example.com/shop
Consider that all four websites have different design and codes.From seo perspective, is it recommended or I should use subdomains or buy four domains for each website?
Do not use subdirectories to serve different, non-related websites. Sub domains can be considered if the websites have 'some' relation. Separate domains are preferable if the websites have nothing in common.
Well, that a good question.
In SEO, it's great to work with Silo's technique. the "market" silo's should deals with one subjet, the "freebies" silo's should deals with another, etc...
Nevertheless, Google needs to qualified the subject of the global site. The qualification of homepage is important for a great SEO strategy.
According to Abondance (famous seo french agency), working on subfolder isn't a bad solution, even if working on subdomain seems to be better (even more if different parts of your site is in different languages).
To conclude, i think that your solution isn't so bad, but some are thinking that subdomains are better, even more if subjects of every parts are really really differents in their content, as said by thaJeztah
I plan to provide content/services across multiple (similar and related) subcategories. In general, users will only be interested in the one subcategory related to their needs.
Users will be searching for the term that would be part of the domain, subdomain or URL.
There's three possible strategies:
primary-domain.tld, with subdomains:
keyword-one.primary-domain.tld
keyword-two.primary-domain.tld
primary-domain.tld, with directories:
primary-domain.tld/keyword-one
primary-domain.tld/keyword-two
or each keyword gets its own domain:
keyword-one-foo.tld
keyword-two-foo.tld
From an SEO point of view, which is the best approach to take? I gather that having one overall domain would mean any links to any of the subdomains or directories weight for the whole site, helping the ranking of each subdomain/directory. However, supposedly if the domain, keywords and title all match nicely with the content, that would rank highly as well. So I'm unsure as to the best approach to take.
The only answer I think anyone could give you here, is that you can't know. Modern search engine algorithms are pretty sophisticated, and to know which marginally different naming methodology is better is impossible to know without inside knowledge.
Also even if you did know, it could change in the future. Or perhaps it doesn't even come to the eqation at all, as it is open for abuse.
99% of the time it comes down to content. Originality, quality etc etc.
As long as you provide the best Quality Content and Make your website more SEO friendly, later domain names doesnot matter,
I personally prefer create several domains and maintain that, when the content grows, you can map it, this may help when you think of content Delivery networks.