Big Brands Get Another Boost with New Domain Extensions

The organization in charge of Internet domain extensions, ICANN, has made the decision to begin selling new domain extensions for just $185,000 each. Are those of us at SearchEngineNews.com getting the checkbook out to secure the .planetocean domain?...No.

Starting a new extension is not going to help you out in search results...yet. As it stands now it will be more like starting out fresh with a whole new Web site than giving you a leg up on the competition. The search engines use so many different signals to rank sites that this is just not going to be significant.

Of course there will be companies that choose to buy extensions to protect their brands. For big name brands that can afford it, such as Facebook, Disney, Apple, etc this could be a good investment to ensure someone else doesn't secure their brand name. All that being said, this will have an impact on search. Adding the new extensions is going to make it harder for users to find what they are looking for long term, pushing them to use the major search engines more than ever before.