Marcus Tober wrote an article this morning on Econsultancy.com about whether or not new gtlds help you rank higher in search ? I read econsultancy.com regularly so I as interested to see them covering the new gtlds. Marcus pointed to the fact that Google has categorically denied that there would be any rankings benefit from using the new domain extensions. He also notes the October 2012 EMD algorithm update that downgraded the positive impact that EMD’s had in ranking when the website quality was lacking.
From the article:
The early evidence from our study indicates that there obviously is a difference and gTLDs rank better, at least for local searches.
It should be noted that this was a rather limited ad hoc analysis; partly because the number of.Berlin domains is still relatively small and because very few of the new gTLDs are currently represented in search results.
But there is at least the beginning of a trend which can be investigated by further analysis.
In general, I think Google will treat the new gTLDs less as a keyword and more as a category. In recent years, Google has tended towards favouring pages in search results that cover the topics relevant to search queries in a comprehensive, holistic way with unique added value information.
So it remains to be seen whether Google will make an exception and convey rankings benefits to specific TLDs.
Read the full article on Econsultancy
Off course Google will deny any gTLD advantage in search 😉
I posted about this study and one more interesting one a month ago at http://blog.europeandomaincentre.com/does-a-new-gtld-rank-higher-in-google-some-seo-cases/. Will definitely be interesting to see more studies.