Does the Domain ending affect search engines?

[xcorranx]

Does .com , .net , or .info affect search results in search engines in any way?

 

[Leyen]

No, it shouldn't. Of course, the site that is most relevant tends to come up first.

For example, if your site is all about football, and you have football.net while football.com is taken by somebody else, then the site with the most number of the word "football" will appear first on the search engine if the search word is "football".

 

[xcorranx]

what do the endings affect then? or do they just display whether or not your commercial, network, information, or specific country?

 

[Leyen]

More or less yeah... Also, a top level domain is more prestigious than something that goes http://www.ipoor.hadtouse.thirdlvldomain.com

and there are a few country extensions like .us, .au, .my, .cn etc.. I'm not gonna list every country in the world.

 

[Jim_Westergren]

The top level domain does not affect the rankings.

There has however been some speculations that .edu, .gov and .mil would have more weight and that links from these TLDs has more weight. But I guess those cannot be regged anyway.

 

[deadserious]

I think it does slightly effect google, not sure about other search engines though. Not a whole lot, but at least enough to notice. So if you had 3 domains with the same link pop, etc., and searched for the name of the domain without the extension, the .com would show up as the first result. I would say you can get a .com for a certain keyword at the top result easier than you could another extension.

 

[RJ]

The top level domain does not affect the rankings.

There has however been some speculations that .edu, .gov and .mil would have more weight and that links from these TLDs has more weight. But I guess those cannot be regged anyway.

I've also heard that, and the same about .ORG also having higher weight in search results that .COM or other TLDs.