The importance of .com

By | April 23, 2007

There is no doubt about it; .com is the undisputed king by a long mile. Speaking from experience, I once had a .info on one of my hosting accounts and even after 5 months it wasn’t indexed at all by Google. Till today, it still has not been indexed, even long after I removed it and switched back a .com.

Amazing….

Admittedly I left the domain there without putting up a site. But here’s the cinch, after I changed it to the .com, the new domain got indexed within less than a month, and that was with no functioning site on, as I was way too busy to build a site.

I also notice that the top pages in Google search results are rarely other extensions apart from .com based sites. Of course, the .com is the extension most in use as proper websites. But still, it’s hard not to notice that other extensions get less “airtime”, unless they are heavily worked on by their owners.

Now, why would the biggest search engine of all seem to prefer .com? Shouldn’t all extensions be considered equal?

The probable reasoning behind this Google logic may be that, “other extensions are cheaper to register, so there is a higher probability of them being used as spam sites that will only clog up the index“. I’m not 100% sure on this, but I feel it may take extra work to build up a non .com site in the search engines, with all things being equal, as opposed to a .com.

It cannot be overemphasized how important a .com domain is and that is why the price for a valuable .com domain is way over all the other extensions. Generic .com domains can fetch jaw dropping prices. Take the example of business.com that sold for 7.6 million dollars.

It might be interesting to take a look at this chart here for high profile domain sales in 2006, as you would notice; the mega sales are dominated by .com. It is also interesting to note that .mobi also had some big sales; though the extension presently still has a long way to go, in as far as popular acceptance is concerned.

Neither is it presently being seen to be mass adopted by telcos who are each fighting their own turf wars. It could turn out to be the case of the mobile phone having to fit into the Web as is the case with the iPhone, and not the Web fitting into the mobile phone. As of now, the debate rages on.

My take on .mobi? I’m still on the fence for this one, but I’ll definitely be talking about it.

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