Are .net domains even worth a damn?

[Anthony Ng]

I am not aware of any countries other than America that play baseball. Certainly no European countries at any rate.

Wow! You really need to get out more, my friend. Baseball is HUGE in Japan and Taiwan at the least.

But when it comes to domain names, hockey.net will only be a third choice at best, after .COM and a RELEVANT ccTLD. For some keywords, a .ORG may be more relevant to many end-users.

Like I said, the bias (of overrating .NET) comes from the early adopters who are mostly technolgy-related. Yes, we may still find some residual old school end-users or some totally uninformed newbies with a silly .net website (like whoeversflorist.net or whereverrestaurant.net), but don't take the losers too seriously.

[wussadotcom]

My preferences:

1.com
2.net
3.info
4.biz
5.us
6.mobi
7.org

Your seriously putting .org below .mobi

[anuj291]

ahhh.. the same old questions again and again...

.com is the best... but .net has equaly worth when it comes to serp
the biggest advantage is .com has history behind it and hence people remember it more easily

[Banned: adonivideo]

When we do a new client, we tell them register your biz name in the .com and then the .us, we then say .net and .org and .info are lesser domains you may want, but we push .com and the .us, if they're a US business and doing most of their business in USA. Then for acquiring keywords, we explain they may want to consider .biz besides the above names, so our order of importance is

.com
.us
.net
.org
.info

Then we add .biz for possible keywords to consider.

Also, for pure position, the .org will pop over any .com all day, and a .gov gets absolute priority, that's the real algorithm the top SE's use, keyword look for .gov, then no .gov look for non-commercial use (.org) then look for commercial (.com) then country code the searcher is in, that's the algorithm all SE's use.

Most 'new businesses' starting to really get into the net, are small or new businesses that may have dabbled in internet marketing, so they may own their name in the .com already, then we make sure they get the other major TLD's relevant to US businesses, then we start to acquire the keywords they need and most are unregistered GEO+keywords, the same phrases they and their competition BUY via PPC.

So for major businesses, and single keywords, the strategy is not the same, but who is acquiring new major companies? No one, all the big corporations now have SEO and SEM guys making over 250K a year to oversee their years old operations, so all the growth today is in small and mid sized businesses that have geo-centric needs and .us is more important in our main market (USA) than a .net is