Madwire Media, Big Commerce Templates, Colorado Web Design

Another Update on the .co vs .com experiment

Posted on Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 at 7:20 am. Tweet

If you have not read the first two posts in this series see them here:

• First post
• Second post

As you know, in our last update we recapped what has happened with our experiment up to this point (see our second post). In the last post we moved forward with optimizing the .com domain for the keyword “27 conversions” like we did previously with the .co domain. At that time, the .co domain was ranking higher than the .com domain because it was optimized and the .com was not, which was a good first step in determining the value of the .co domain. For the next step, rather than optimizing the .com domain equally or better then the .co domain we wanted to just optimize it a little bit (not as good as the .co). The reason for this was to see if in fact the .co continued to rank higher since it was indeed indexed first, currently ranking higher for the keyword “27 conversions” and also more fully optimized.

After the .com was optimized (but not as optimized as the .co domain) it quickly moved above the .co domain in rankings for the keyword “27 conversions”! Clearly proving that more weight is given to the .com domain vs. the .co domain in Google’s algorithms. Currently in the USA the .com domain ranks #3 and the .co domain ranks #4 for the keyword “27 conversions”.

The good news is the exact match .co domain was indexed fast and did rise quickly in rankings for its targeted keyword. The bad news is the less optimized exact match .com domain will be hard to beat! Can it be done? Maybe. We’re going to step-up our game by further optimizing the .co domain (building some links and adding some more content). We’ll see what happens.

We’ll give this another week or two and then post another update.

(Here is a piece of bread for the .co domain - 27 Conversions)

Tags: .co vs .com, google algorithms