Looking for material discussing domain registrations of
.com and.net and if one or the other holds a better chance for a good
SE ranking, particularly... will a site ending in .net be penalized in
rankings if they are trully a commerce site, and not a network?

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Request for Question Clarification by morris-ga on 17 Jun 2002 18:23 PDT

evilal,

It appears that you have posted the same question twice by accident,
so I suggest you use your "cancel question" option with this one. BTW,
there is no penalty for .com vs .net registration, except in
word-of-mouth, i.e., if you tell everybody "you have to go to
mysite.net", some of them will forget and type "mysite.com."

morris-ga

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Clarification of Question by evilal-ga on 18 Jun 2002 07:06 PDT

Yes...Google contacted me about the double post.  Just a glich that
they are working out as we speak.

Thanks for the comments guys.  I just wanted to be sure I was not
doing myself any harm by not following a set of rules that I possibly
was not aware of.  I know many things can penalize you these
days...just wanted to be sure.

The common thought on this issue, as even evidenced by the comments
about your question, has been that .net does not suffer noticeably
when compared with .com.  However, a June 10, 2002 article in _Site
Pro News_, "Domains and URLs: Search Engine Ranking" By James D.
Brausch, Vice President of Marketing for Target Blaster, Inc., an
Internet Marketing firm specializing in targeted traffic, indicates
that this thinking is incorrect.

"Recently we performed large statistical analysis of the top ranking
sites and studied the domain names and URLs to see if we could find
any correlation. Over 20,000 listings were examined for 110 separate
factors and the results tabulated and statistically analyzed...We
never expected the ".net" domains to be ranked lower, but that is what
the data suggests. In fact it is a very strong correlation. We used to
think that a ".net" domain was almost as good as a ".com" domain. We
will now avoid them."
< http://www.sitepronews.com/archives/2002/june/10.html >

Unfortunately, the statistical reports themselves must be purchased
for $95, but they are available.
< http://www.targetblaster.com/serf/ >

It is easy for us to convince each other that something is so.  It may
very well have been that several years ago, there was no discernible
difference between .net and .com extensions.  However, if current
statistical analysis shows that there now is a noticeable and negative
difference, I personally would accept that and avoid .net extensions.

I hope this answers your question in time.

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Clarification of Answer by acorn-ga on 24 Jun 2002 10:16 PDT

Oh, to clarify...with your question "will a site ending in .net be
penalized in
rankings if they are trully a commerce site, and not a network?", no,
it won't be penalized because it's a truly commercial site...it will
be penalized because it is a .net extension.  Regardless of why a .net
is penalized, being penalized is probably something to be avoided.

https://answers.google.com/answers/main?cmd=threadview&id=13783

This question has some tips about search engine optimizations. Though
I don't thnk you might find the answer for.com vs .net

From my knowledge, the ranking of a site *should* hot be affected
whether it is a .com or a .net site. The reason being that there has
been too much pollution in the .com, and the .net domains. If the
search engines do give a prefrential treatment then they will be at a
loss as their rankings of websites will not seem to be correct.

regards

hi evilal,
   i own a web-designing company and have over 100 .com and .net
domains registered. However the search engine does not base its
listing around the domain extension. Rather it looks at the meta data
( keywords , description and title ) and then looks at the content to
check whether the specified meta data is appropriate.
So, from the point of SE, its the content and the meta data thats
important,
not the extension of the site.
In case of any clarification, i'll be glad to help
let me know,
gaurav

I agree with the first post.  From and SEO perspective, there is no
difference between a .COM and a .NET.  The difference is only
perception from a users standpoint, with a .COM obviously being the
preferred.

Relevant content and inbound links are 2 major keys to high search
engine rankings.

For more info re: SEO check out:

www.searchenginewatch.com
www.searchengineforums.com
www.peakplacement.com
www.webmamma.com
www.seopros.net

Hope this helps!