Extension advice

[competentdomains]

Once again to be asked about. But as we all know, Google (and Yahoo) have earlier changed their algorithms in time.

One year ago I regged a .name domain, just a pure big consumer product name. Recently I started to develop it but thought I wanted a shorter extension instead. There was one available, as .nu , so I took that one.
Then I thought again, maybe .name is better than .nu. It is longer, but sounds as a familiar word for the largest target, who are english speaking people. And it is a year old too.
Is Google all equal to all extensions, even .name, that was intended for names? There can be found other common mismatches, like SuperXXSale.org
, CharityXXOrganisation.biz or NonProfitXXGuide.com. But .name is name so I just wondered, before doing anything that won´t be a good idea.
And what about Yahoo, that as far as I dare to say, favors urls just a little more than google, with names equal to the title (searched word/phrase).

 

[HappyBunny]

For search engines, all extensions are treated equal.

For Google, if you have .co.uk it will rank more for searchers from UK.

 

[Kate]

.name is probably an extension you will want to avoid

It depends on the scope of your project but for business purposes .name will certainly not fit. 'nu' means now in Dutch & Swedish so if you are targetting these people this might be OK. Otherwise it's just an exotic extension among plenty of others.

That being said all extensions are OK for development but for SEO purposes be aware that the search engines give some weight to the ccTLD. For example .nu would make most sense if the site has some relationship to Niue...

SEO is one thing but consider that consumers may shun away from extensions that sound odd to them, or that they are not familiar with.
Technically all extensions are equal, in practice they do not all get the same treatment.

 

[competentdomains]

I know, with SEO, also the impression that people get should be counted in.
But how many people care about the extension? I have got some .nets with somewhat longer names. Like portable*, *guide etc that to my surprise was available som maybe I should take them instead, but they are longer. (Even .coms but haven´t registered them, I feel a bit confused because there are more alternatives available than I expected
Maybe some people who see .nu (etc) among all the ordinary people, think its a spam virus site so they don´t click on it, I´m not sure. And I am swedish so I know about nu-now. Nu-sites comes 2nd here followed by com and net nearly equal.

I think I will do different sites with the same content though changed in some ways. I will find out later how it goes. I believe short names can do better, and even with sub domains with manufacturers first won´t do the whole name too long. (Like sony.xxxxxxxxx.nu etc.)

Ambivalence can be an obstacle!!