GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 37 - February 2017

is probably the most competitive industry on the web, the nature of the game has shifted back to brands. Since there are so many websites doing casino reviews, you can’t stand out by having casinoreviews.com, because a brand beats EMD in direct confrontation. Also, if you own an EMD, you’d better be able to deliver the promise and actually be the authority. Buyers of EMDs often think they don’t have to brand, but they do. Both the buyers of brandable domain names and exact-match domain names need to make the customer remember their brand, so they’re absolutely in the same boat. Is .com still king? Yes. Not because Google says so (it doesn’t), but because cus- tomers say so. The majority of customers in any given country are only able to recognize .com – and inmany cases, a country’s top-level doman (TLD), such as .co.uk, .de, .au or .it – as “real” domain names. They simply don’t trust or understand the others. In some cases, however, a .com can be a disadvantage. In the U.K. market, .co.uk will signal to the customer that the website is targeting the U.K. audience, as opposed to being a global English-speaking website that does not target anyone. If there are identical domain names with .com and .co.uk, the U.K. cus- tomer will click the latter, even if it’s one spot below in SERPs. When selling a domain name for a profit, .com is the only viable option, as the domainers deem other extensions mostly worthless. In fact, if you buy a domain with an extension other than .com, you’ve condemned yourself to actually building a website on it and making it work. Very rarely will someone else see the value and potential of your .cc or .fm domain. Country targeting All generic TLDs – including new domain names – can target any country through the Google Search Console and therefore get a higher rank in that country, but country-specific TLDs can only rank in their own country. Fewwebmasters decide to target their own country, usu- ally because it’s “too small,” because they don’t want to limit themselves to a single market, or because the internet is deemed a “global” thing where borders do T here were 350 million registered domain names as of the end of calendar year 2016. With the influx of 1,500 new top-level domain extensions and the constant changes in Google’s algorithm, it is more challenging than ever to find the perfect domain name for your project. “All the good ones are taken,” is the common refrain. But is it really so? Exact-match vs. brandable domain names The main reason to buy an exact-match domain (EMD) is to get an unfair advantage in search engine results pages (SERPs) by topping them because you match the typed keyword. It used to work like a charm, but it’s no longer that simple. Plus, you will likely want to rank for many keywords, so sticking with the single one in the domain name might be a limiting factor. The advantage of EMDs for ranking is gone, but they can still make a lot of sense from the customer’s point of view, especially if it’s a money keyword and not a vague dictionary term. Basically, whenever you’re aggregating something (i.e., other brands), it makes sense to be unbranded and go with the keyword. Make it really simple for the customer. You want car insurance? Here’s CarInsurance.com. Promise delivered. Most people aren’t really looking for more than that, anyway. Affiliation is by default an aggregation business, so it would make sense to be unbranded. However, since online gambling These days, businesses don’t need to be website-based . A Facebook page, a Twitter account, or an Android or iPhone app can definitely be a standalone business , and new platforms are coming up all the time . The future of domain names 36 w w w . g p w a t i m e s . o r g