Do .co Domains Rank Well Organically?
We’ve been hearing a lot about .co domains lately. Some reports even think that they will take out the .com TLD within 10 years or less. We don’t know if that will happen but we are interested in whether or not Google ranks .co domains equally to .com domains.
As a test, we are conducting this experiment:
We purchased two identical domain names (except for the domain extensions):
We then created a plain static page at each of those domains.
For 27conversions.co we optimized the title tag, H1 heading, and first paragraph of content for the keyword “27 conversions”.
For 27conversions.com we did no optimization at all. The only optimization the .com domain has is the targeted URL.
We then wrote this blog post and published it and tweeted it to alert Google to check them out and index the websites.
Now we wait…
Technically, the .co domain should rank higher because it is more SEO optimized. However, if Google ranks the .com domain higher we’ll know that the .co domains are less weighted in Google’s algorithms than the .com domains. It if turns out that the .co domain ranks higher than the .com domain, like it technically should, you can be rest assured that using .co domains are okay for search engine optimization. However, we’ll conduct a few more tests to be sure based on the results (one of them being to optimize the .com and see what happens).
We’ll post another blog soon with the results.
Tags: .co domains, .co vs .com, do .co domains rank well organically, how does google rank .co domains
9 Responses to “Do .co Domains Rank Well Organically?”
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Any Idea when the results will be published. I wanted to try the .co domain test also but never got to it. This would be really interesting and will actually increase the .co domain prices if it turns out the .co domain outranks the .com. Thanks for the post, will be looking out for your results.
It will be within the next week or sooner for sure.
Great experiment. I’m curious to know how this work out.
Interesting, as I was trying to find out whether .co domains can rank well organically. Just did a search, and the .co version is on #1 of Google, whereas .com is on #4.
Still insufficient info to accurately gauge, but still a useful exercise nonetheless. Will hang on to my .co domains for now
Looks like the .co domain name is ranking above the .com as it should. Please let me know if you run more experiments like these.
Tested from Australia using google.com.au for the keywords 27 Conversions and the .com had first position and .co in fourth position.
Not a good sign.
Hi, I’m seing .co rank higher here. Do you mind publishing the final results?
I was curious about this same concept with .us since they are cheaper than .com but didnt want to waste my time writing up a blog if its going to be hard to rank?
Currently on Dec 20 from Thailand .com is ranking higher than the .co. I have rarely seen a .co rank high for a normal search term. Has anyone else seen a .co rank for a competitive term?