March 29, 2024

googIn today’s business world you think of a name for your company or business, then see its name is available with a .com after it. The same goes for movies, books and other creative endeavors. If its taken you move on to the next name and so on and so on. But don’t forget that there is more than .com as a top level domain. The .org, .net and .info complete the original mix but more have been added. There is now .info, .biz, .mobi, .me and more. These domains’ intent was to help identify the type of site, or what device it was suited for and a few others. Also along the way came “country” extensions such as .co, .ca, .it and others. Those that played with the names quickly realized that they could get cute with the endings and so creativity hit the domain market and names got gobbled up quickly. But here’s the problem.

The country extensions were really meant for sites in that country or specific to it. So an .it site was to Italian, either about Italy or in Italian, same for .sp as in Spain, and .ca for Canada. The term for this is Geotargetable domains. They target specific geogrpaphys of the world. So now you have a problem, because as we all know Google can tell pretty quickly what your site is about or what words, or maybe what words don’t appear on your site. Its very easy for them to not list any page in search and for a while that would happen to those sites that just gobbled up cute names.

So they made a list of these domain extensions that are NOT geotargetable. If you recall the domain .TV belongs to a country who made a deal to sell it or the use of it as its a small country, and no where near a television. This action leaves us to use these extensions anyway we like and exempt from any no listing, and if you happen to need to have your site geotargeted to that nation all you need to do is let Google know, they will take it from there.

So back to the new domain name. You should absolutely grab all of those names atop the list. Guy Kawasaki said that a long time ago and he knows something this Internet business. What you do with the domain, or where each points may have changed or may require some reading up on but no one will be able to hijack your name. The country ones, well now you know the ones to look at.

Also once you get things running, especially if you are using multiple site read up on a few of the latest rules for linking and sharing links. These rules change all the time so I’ll leave it at that.

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