'Half empty' or 'half full'?

[Bill Roy]

I see a few posts on here and discussions in the chat room where some members are against developing the singular or plural of a domain or a domain in a suffix other than .com. The reason given generally seems to be that you will automatically lose traffic to the singular/plural or .com.

It strikes me that this vision of whether to develop or not can be seen as akin to whether a person generally sees a half filled glass as being 'half empty' or 'half full'. This is a personal choice made by each individual, but I would ask those who are against developing such sites to consider the following.

A developed site, say asdfgtrewq.info may not get the amount of type-in traffic that asdfgtrewq.com gets, but as a developed site the search engines will start listing the site asdfgtrewq.info, this will bring search engine traffic to the site. Now should the site be what visitors are looking for some will bookmark the site and automatically come back to the site in preference to typing in the .com if once visited is found not to contain what the visitor wants. Also backlinks will be created to the site hopefully, this will also get traffic to the site in preference to the .com.

Now it may well be that the type-in statistics always will favour the .com, that is not in dispute, but the percentage of visitors to a well developed non .com will always flow in the direction of the site and against the undeveloped .com. This is a medium to long term view, but if a developed site attracts 1,000 visitors a day it may well 'bleed' another 200 to the .com, but suddenly the glass of the non .com is fuller than that of the .com.

The same goes for singular against plurals, the better developed the site will eventually out do the non-developed or poorly developed site no matter what.

In a way you can think of it like paying taxes, a percentage of your earnings goes to the more popular .com or singular/plural as the case may be. But just as with Government taxes where there are accountants to help save you paying so much tax there are SEO and marketing experts who can diminish the bleed from your site to another.

[dcristo]

Don't worry about losing traffic to the .com or more popular version, losing traffic to them means you already have a POPULAR site, which is the goal... search engine, link/bookmark traffic make up a SIGNIFICANT % of traffic. And if they did end up on a different site by chance which is parked, what do you think the user would do?