With all of the new TLD domain names coming out, did you ever wonder if keyword based TLD’s such as .attorney or .seo will actually have any SEO benefit? Well, you’re not the only one – and I am sure that plenty of people originally got excited about the new TLD’s thinking they would be able to quickly boost their rankings for a specific keyword by purchasing a matching TLD – however Google isn’t about to let ranking be that easy.
Barry Schwartz from SERoundTable asked John Mueller this during yesterday’s Google+ hangout, and the answer is: Google completely ignores all words in the TLD portion of a domain name.
Here is the complete transcript:
Barry: So, I know we shouldn’t care about keywords in the URLs and so forth, but Google has said over time that keywords in the URL do get looked at by the algorithms, they might have a tiny little, tiny little, itty-bitty factor in terms of rankings. But you specifically called out saying that keyword rich TLDs, like .attorney for example… Are they not looked at all? Do you say anything in the TLD is not, the keywords in the TLDs are not looked at all? Are they excluded? Or are they the same as keywords in the URL?
John Mueller: As far as I understand, it’s pretty much completely. So the TLD is not something we take into account there.
Barry: At all?
John Mueller: Yea.
Check out the full video embedded above, or watch it directly on YouTube here.