I'm thinking of grabbing a new .co TLD. Is it worth it?

• My boss asked me to look at grabbing one of the new .co TLD's for our business. He likes the idea that people associate that TLD with "company" and that there are still plenty available. How does Google treat these and is this an approach we should consider?

Answer: The .co domains are certainly here to stay and becoming increasingly popular as you may have seen in the recent Super Bowl XLVI ad by GoDaddy.com. As you noted, it's often associated with "company" - although it's actually representative of the country of Columbia. It became available for worldwide representation in March 2010 by global registrar InterNetX.

Many brands are making the switch to .co domains or at least adding them to their domain portfolio. In fact, noted Internet retailer Overstock.com ran television commercials advertising the new "O.co" domain for their site prominently during the recent holiday shopping season. The name is short, catchy and has branding appeal.

Twitter is also using the TLD to power their T.co URL shortening service. This means that instead of having to use bit.ly or tinyurl.com to shorten a link on Twitter, users will be able to get even further reduction with just three characters.

The .co TLD is simple to remember and is very closely related to .com. It's also likely that people will remember your URL, even if you don't have the related .com for that particular domain name.

Further, possessing this TLD can provide you with an opportunity to rebrand or expand your business. A survey conducted by