Do Specific TLDs Give Sites a Ranking Boost in Google? No!

• We got a cold call from a company trying to sell us a new TLD and they were very insistent that these would give us a ranking boost. They said specifically that Google has a known-domain bias and that if we grab some of these new TLDs we will get a clear ranking benefit from having them. Is there any truth to this?

Answer: This is a pretty common question in our online support system. Do any of these new TLD (Top Level Domain) extensions coming on the market worldwide, such as .shop .ibm .wine or others, hold any long-term ranking boost in the search engines? In other words, would grabbing these out of the gate provide you a ranking preference in Google?

The answer isn't no...it's HELL no! This is a myth, pure and simple.

Nevertheless, this myth has become so rampant on the Internet that earlier this year Google Search Quality Engineer extraordinaire Matt Cutts took to his own Google Plus page to debunk this recent SEO marketing article on the topic which purported the belief that these new top-level domains would trump the traditional .com results in Google search. Matt's response was the following:

"Sorry, but that's just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception...If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings."

So there you have it, straight from the "horse's mouth" (so-to-speak): if you are looking to register one of these catchy new TL...