Is there any SEO impact because of domain registrar?

[WebDevHere]

Hello,

Maybe it is a stupid question, but it came to my mind - how do you think is there any difference from SEO perspective at what company (for ex. godaddy, dynadot and so on) domain is registered? Can it be a SEO factor?

It seems silly question, but as I imagine google have different "weights" for tlds, for example .com is better than .info, so maybe they have different "weights" for domain registrars? What do you think?

 

[enlytend]

No. It is not.

.com isn't given a different "weight" in its own right than .info or any other gtld (cctlds have more "weight" in their own country and less elsewhere). It's POSSIBLE that sites on domains which are inexpensive and heavily spammed are scrutinized more closely.

 

[WebDevHere]

Thanks for your opinion, enlytend!

I agree that in theory all gtdls should be equal.

But practically I still think that there is some "weight" on different gtlds, maybe it is very little impact (maybe it depends only on some circumstances / niches / keywords etc), but still it is.

Because once I had a client who switched from .biz to .com domain and after few weeks he began to receive 200% more visitors from google than before. Dot biz domain did not had any manual spam actions or etc. No other modifications were done to the site, only simple 301 redirect. Of course maybe it is a coincidence, but still changing domain gave awesome results in that case

So I'd be glad to hear more opinions / stories about this topic. Thank you!

 

[enlytend]

Interesting - of course the devil's usually in the details ... What accounted for the increased traffic? Was the domain the same other than the extension? Was it a fresh reg or did the .com have some "history" behind it? Did the traffic and rankings stay or did they drop back after a while? Anyway ...

- "Ordinary people" aren't familiar with / don't entirely trust domains which aren't mainstream (com/net/org/certain country codes) and are less likely to click IF the URL is visible in the search results.
- User interaction with the search results IS a factor. If they put something in a certain spot, lets say on the first page for a particular query, and it gets a lower CTR than they would expect according to their other data like the throughput on the neighboring listings, it would look like it isn't "worthy" of that spot and it won't stay there.
- FWIW, Google has said time and time again that they don't "discriminate" against any particular extensions ... easy enough to set up an experiment to see if they're telling the truth .

That said, I've seen many good .info sites that rank, sold a .biz a while back to a company that built a nice niche online magazine that ranked well in its niche, and I have a .info of my own that ranks for a crap-ton of keywords and pulls in a healthy affiliate income (after recovering from a penalty years ago). But generally I do avoid non-mainstream domains.

Definitely not the registrar though.. Barring any weird technical issues.

 

[WebDevHere]

Very good insights, enlytend

Well in my client's case it was a switch from [THEIR-BRAND].biz to [THEIR-BRAND].com
I am not working with that client anymore, so I can't say if the traffic stayed or dropped.

But as you said, it is possible that somehow user interaction in google serp changed and that gave that boost. Or maybe it was just some kind of coincidence

OFFTOPIC: By the way, I see that you are moderator here, so is it possible to create a poll in this forum? I can't find it anywhere somehow, and I think it would be useful for a questions like these

 

[enlytend]

One thing that came to mind was with the 301 - if there were any algo-impacted links pointing to the old domain there used to be some "lag time" before those went back on "the list" after a redirect.

Polls and surveys - good question .

When you start a new thread, there's an option way down at the bottom for "Post a Poll" - that's where you set your questions, answers and options. I don't think there's a way to do it once the thread has been created.

 

[Chris Wright]

One obvious explanation is type in traffic was bleeding over. Some people were typing TheirBrand.com all along. Not finding their intended target until the .com went live.

Back to your question...
If one registrar's nameserver resolves your domain faster than another's, Goog might favor that.

 

[WebDevHere]

Hey there, Iconic, welcome to discussion

Good point on nameservers, but my initial thought and question was does domain registrar has any impact on SEO rankings. Because you can buy domain name and change default registrar nameservers for example to cloudflare or any other dns provider.

Anyway, do you know any tools to test the speed of namerserver resolving? I often use "fetch as googlebot" feature on google wmt, but there you can only see the total time, not divided into different sections.

 

[enlytend]

If you google it, there are tools.

That said, DNS resolution isn't all that much about the performance of the authoritative nameservers for a domain - it's a heirarchical system. Once a setting is made, it propogates to other DNS servers throughout the world. A brower request would first check locally (generally nameservers belonging to your ISP), then escalate on up the heirarchy until it finds a nameserver that can resolve the request. Only if it can't find one closer, will it end up at the nameserver you set for the domain. So response varies by user and location.

DNS servers which update their zones frequently will propogate CHANGES faster, but won't have an effect on browsing once changes are propogated. After that, the only requests they will affect are the few which end up at the authoritative server, in which case server performance could be an issue.

However browsing using nameservers which have good performance can speed up YOUR own page access and minimize timeouts.

 

[WebDevHere]

Well, as I understand it is almost impossible to know how much time does it take for googlebot to resolve DNS. The only option possible as I imagine would be if google wmt or some other tool from google would show this time.

But of course, if I understand correctly, there is not only one datacenter that googlebot come from, so DNS resolving time should vary from one datacenter/location to another

 

[enlytend]

Yes, datacenter would affect it, but more to the point most of the time the DNS servers which resolve the domain are not under your control.

It won't show in WMT because its not a meaningful metric.

This is a pretty good picture of how names are resolved. If it finds an answer cached at the first step, it doesn't go through all the rest.

 

[Bestseoservice]

better to use .com websites, Its will consider as globally,

 

[WebDevHere]

Bestseoservice, welcome to discussion

Do you have any evidence / experience that it is better to use .com domains?
And what do you think does SEO rankings depends on domain registrar?

 

[WebDevHere]

Hey,

Nice picture, thanks for sharing

Yes, datacenter would affect it, but more to the point most of the time the DNS servers which resolve the domain are not under your control.

It won't show in WMT because its not a meaningful metric.

This is a pretty good picture of how names are resolved. If it finds an answer cached at the first step, it doesn't go through all the rest.