.com .net question

[dotman]

is there any real difference in having a .com name over a .net name in terms of search engines?

Do .com's rank higher in results?

Sorry if this is a newb question!

 

[gdurni]

I am not sure what the real answer to this question is but to my experience, .net has been just as effective as .com's for me on Google, Yahoo and MSN.

 

[dotman]

what about all the other TLD's?

How come .com is the one everyone wants?

 

[seeker]

no difference in search engines whatsoever, inlcuding the majority of extensions.
*however* once people find your site through a search engine, they may remember your domain name, but might type the .com extension as it is the most known and used in the world. You therefore lose some traffic to the .com owner.
If your site is well established, the amount of traffic lost is not significant.
when starting out however, it is best to start with a .com for these reasons and for brandability.
Still the other extensions are just as good for SEO

 

[DomainEngineer]

I agree with Seeker's view and this is my additional reasoning to develop .COM domain:

There are so many extensions (may be about 200 total including country codes). Now if in future all those sites are developed and people mistype the extention to .COM (from all those sites) 5% of the time, then your total traffic will be huge without ever doing any marketing/advertising. This 5% figure is very conservative.

I have a domain and there is a similar name site developed in other country code. I get good traffic on the domain and every time I check it 70% of the traffic is from that country where the other developed site is. Other 30% is type-in.

Even though 10% of my domains are non-dot-COMs but I may not develop them and spend money on advertising. But I know traffic to .COMs is only going to go up as the time passes and more other extensions get developed. It may be 5 or 10 years from now, but .COMs are poised for big benefit without spending money.

Just my 2 cents.

Thanks.

 

[Jernet]

In my opinion, .net is the next best extension. I have had quite a few one and two word .nets that got 50-100 type-ins per day. My deduction on this is that the .com version was undeveloped. Since most people know .net, if the .com doesn't work, they go to the .net to see if anything is there....I know I do.

For valuation purposes tho, it seems that .net version usually sells between 10-20% of the value of the .com version....mostly in reference to generic domains.