Some advice wanted please on non .com development

[ebiz]

Hello I have a .as domain that has been online for a few years and even ranked high for a while. I want to take the project, not necessarily the domain to the next level of success (selling online). My question and concern is would it be best to not use the .as and go with a .com if my market is here in the USA? The .as domain is a very good domain for my project except for the .as part. I have pretty good .com replacement ready but the .as has been online for a long time and is ready to develop. Any input appreciated.

 

[iowadawg]

Always go .com if possible.
Not many people are looking for any business with .as, or some many of the thousand new extensions.

 

[ebiz]

thanks, the business will be eCommerce and traffic will come from SEO

 

[Charles Sweeney]

I think you should make the .com site and redirect visits from the old site to the new one. Permanently redirect with a 301 response so you don't have duplicate content.

I don't think changing the domain will make any difference to the number of visits you get, it will still be the same site with the same offering.

Good luck!

 

[ebiz]

Hello yes I think the .com is the better bet. The .as is a one word domain and the .com is the same word with three letters in front , it is still a good domain I feel.

thanks for input

 

[buyselldoms]

make sure you only serve your website on https, have a site seal on your page also if you can

I agree that a .com would be better, especially considering the .as has no relevance to your website (?)

 

[Charles Sweeney]

make sure you only serve your website on https

Why so?

 

[OptimaDomains]

SEO-wise: Currently .AS is treated like a gTLD so there is no ranking advantage of a .COM.

Brand-wise: .COM is king.

If you're serious about this site and plan to hold onto it for a long time, I would rebrand as a .COM and do a 301 redirect from the old domain.

 

[buyselldoms]

Why so?

Because its an ecommerce website and is good practice... rather than solely https for payment processing. Its a minimum standard nowadays.

(Do keep in mind you would redirect all http to https!!! Google is favouring secure websites too)

 

[Charles Sweeney]

Because its an ecommerce website and is good practice... rather than solely https for payment processing. Its a minimum standard nowadays.

(Do keep in mind you would redirect all http to https!!! Google is favouring secure websites too)

Rubbish. You only need to encrypt secure information. SSL sites are slower because EVERYTHING has to be encrypted. Google favouring them??? Got my doubts about that. Since when did Google favour security over content? In any event, you should make a site for visitors, not Google.

I see a lot of sites now using SSL when they don't need to, Google for example and even this forum. I suspect the reason they do so is because it's easier to make the WHOLE site SSL rather than just the secure areas (I've implemented SSL properly on a site of my own before). Laziness and a lack of technical ability being to blame.

Minimum standard? Bullshit. Please do not post such misleading information, some people might believe it.

 

[Charles Sweeney]

Because its an ecommerce website and is good practice.

Better tell Amazon that. (They correctly use SSL only where it's needed)

 

[buyselldoms]

Rubbish. You only need to encrypt secure information. SSL sites are slower because EVERYTHING has to be encrypted. Google favouring them??? Got my doubts about that. Since when did Google favour security over content? In any event, you should make a site for visitors, not Google.

I see a lot of sites now using SSL when they don't need to, Google for example and even this forum. I suspect the reason they do so is because it's easier to make the WHOLE site SSL rather than just the secure areas (I've implemented SSL properly on a site of my own before). Laziness and a lack of technical ability being to blame.

Minimum standard? Bullshit. Please do not post such misleading information, some people might believe it.

Well if you are going to be pedantic why even bother with secure website (its TLS not SSL, you fool) - not your card details... as long as you receive them at the other end you can process. The reason why you have this is for trust. Obviously in certain cases its a legal requirement such as financial institutions.

Secure websites are not necessarily any slower than a non-secure website. It has to be encrypted yes, but depends on the hardware and setup... many secure websites are much faster than poorly (typically oversold) non-secure websites. There is still always the bottleneck regarding script processing, database queries and the like.

Google doesn't favour security over content, having a secure website wont get you up the top of the SERPs. Google does factor it in though, but if its shared hosting the penalty for a slower website will outweigh any positives by having a secure website with signed certificate.

YOU ARE MAKING A SITE FOR VISITORS, NOT GOOGLE!

The reason why an ecommerce website should be a secure website is to bring trust for your web visitors. Google has decided to award secure websites some points... to encourage quality amongst websites. Page speed and trust has zero factor to content; but its important factors to the end user... no one wants a slow loading website or a website that doesn't respect their privacy or security.

 

[buyselldoms]

Better tell Amazon that. (They correctly use SSL only where it's needed)

LOL, epic fail! Amazon is the worlds largest ecommerce business.

They don't have a secure website for all pages loaded because its too expensive. You need an account to buy anything. Try a smaller example which isn't complete stupidity?

Some people would order something from Amazon even if it wasn't a secure website as its a global household name and super-brand.

If you want an ecommerce website, you should really use a secure website all round.

 

[Charles Sweeney]

"Well if you are going to be pedantic why even bother with secure website (its TLS not SSL, you fool) "

SSL became TLS. There's not much difference between them. The point is they are both secure connections. You only need to use a secure connection for sensitive information. It's pointless to use resources and time to encrypt pages that don't need to be encrypted, hence the likes of Amazon using it properly for user login areas and not their main site.

I use the term SSL because I'm old school and I notice that all the big SSL certificate providers still call them SSL certificates...and you call me pedantic!

 

[buyselldoms]

Glad you researched the difference.

Its completely different with Amazon. They have a distributed network of servers for content and CDNs for images etc. They get enormous amounts of traffic globally... its not just a single server in a single datacentre.

Its not worthwhile for them to serve all the images from a secure website, doing this with a non-secure CDN on a secure page will only raise errors and cause problems with user trust.

I am sure the OP hasn't got millions of images to serve billions of page views so hardly have the same problem.

Its called irony, you were being pedantic, I can be pedantic too!

 

[Charles Sweeney]

Yep, quick research told me that SSL 3.0 became TLS 1.0 with not a great deal of difference between the two and Symantec, Thawte and GoDaddy still call their SSL certificates "SSL" certificates. So it looks like I'm in good company if I say SSL!

I hear what you're saying but for me it doesn't make any difference if it's a big site or a small site, It's still *completely* pointless to encrypt data that doesn't need to be encrypted because it uses resources and time. Why do it if you don't need to?

I installed a SSL certificate on one of my sites. Quite a steep learning curve but I did it. I only used it for a user login (because that was all that needed encrypting). It did let me see how they worked and the potential problems you might have with them and how the secure pages interact with the non-secure pages. This is how I know that sites that encrypt EVERY page are doing so through laziness. You've seen warnings on web pages that state that some of the content will be sent non-encrypted (usually images). That's down to poor coding and the "cheat" is to make *everything* https so there's no need to make allowances for secure/non-secure information.

I would advise people to follow Amazon's example and only encrypt data that needs to be encrypted.

 

[TalkDevelopment]

Ask Matt Cutt about ssl having an impact on seo. It doesn't! They may in the future but right now Google does not take ssl into consideration when ranking!

 

[buyselldoms]

Ask Matt Cutt about ssl having an impact on seo. It doesn't! They may in the future but right now Google does not take ssl into consideration when ranking!

I think you need to look up what SEO means!

I think you are getting confused with your terminology. It quite clearly is correct, that SSL doesn't have an impact on "SEO"...

Google uses multiple data to rank pages - 4 types... 1) on page content, 2) off-page content/linking etc, 3) domain/website attributes (age in SERPs,length of registration,IP, page loading speed etc) and 4) manual tweaks.

I can tell you for certain that a self-signed certificate wont have any impact.

Also to point out, Google wont give a complete definite answer... they are only interested in encouraging quality, not revealing secrets as to how their algorithm works.

 

[TalkDevelopment]

Sorry but I do not understand what you are saying. We are in agreement. Certs have no impact at this time on search rankings. I am saying the same thing as you are.

This may change though in the future from what I have read from Matt Cutt and others but right now it does not have an impact.

And I know what seo means as I do it for a living among other things.

In regards to the OP I would say that .com is king but again does not have an impact on search rankings.

 

[buyselldoms]

Sorry but I do not understand what you are saying. We are in agreement. Certs have no impact at this time on search rankings. I am saying the same thing as you are.

This may change though in the future from what I have read from Matt Cutt and others but right now it does not have an impact.

And I know what seo means as I do it for a living among other things.

In regards to the OP I would say that .com is king but again does not have an impact on search rankings.

Search Engine Optimisation is about optimising websites to perform better in search engines (funny that)... therefore nothing impacts or affects SEO other than budget and time. None of the algorithm ranking factors affect SEO, they affect the SERPs.

Many people in the SEO world would argue that the choice of domain extension makes a difference.