Google swears blind it doesn't give SEO advantage to new internet dot-words

So why do people continue not to believe it?

Not sure we believe you

So why even now are people tempted not to believe the company?

Well, for one thing, it makes perfect sense for Google to account for new internet dot-words in search rankings.

If people are searching for, say, pizza and there is a website ending in .pizza, there is a much higher likelihood that you can find information about pizza there.

As such, people are carefully parsing Google's language. Mueller wrote: "Overall, our systems treat new gTLDs like other gTLDs (like .com & .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search."

While that may appear to be black-and-white, it does not discount what some companies have been noting, which is that if you search for "new york pizza" and you have a domain ending in .pizza, you are likely to do better than a domain that ends in something else, like .com. However, you may not currently rank higher than the domain name newyorkpizza.com because it also has the word "pizza" in it.

In other words, Google is not looking at the end of a domain and giving it extra credit.

This approach makes sense currently. Google uses a wide range of factors in determining how to rank websites, and their domain names make up a small part of that. More important are things like the actual content on a website and the number of other websites that link to it.

With the take-up of new gTLDs so small at the moment, it is likely that there is no real benefit from giving domain endings an added advantage. That may change in future, but Google is of the view that if all those new .pizza domains take off, then their existing ranking systems would work just as well in recognizing their value.

Regardless, it still feels like common sense to people that Google would account for a particular ending. And that common sense gets all the larger when it comes to city names and brand names.

It is extremely likely that someone registering a .london domain is based in London. It is even more the case for someone registering a .nyc domain, because the company that runs the back-end actually checks that someone is based in New York before they are allowed a .nyc domain.

Therefore it is hard to imagine that Google won't end up using a domain ending in .nyc as a way of geo-tagging so it appears higher in the rankings to people who are searching while physically standing in New York. Again though, it is early days and Google clearly doesn't feel things have changed sufficiently for it to treat these domains differently.

Brand game changer

The case for brand names is likely to be even more clear-cut. One third of the roughly 1,500 applications for new internet top-level domains were for brand names – including many of the world's biggest brand names: IBM, Heinz, Lego, Ferrari, Intel, and of course Google.

The reality currently is that almost none of those companies have actually launched their new internet dot-words. Some have posted one or two webpages, but there currently exists almost nothing under brand-name internet dot-words.

That is going to change over time, and then it is almost a certainty that Google will change its search engine algorithms to account for that new reality. Why? Because there will be no ambiguity over the domains: they will all be owned and run by the company that owns the top-level domain.

So, for example, surface.microsoft will, without any doubt, be a domain set up by Microsoft for its Surface tablet range. Likewise if Microsoft launches a new product today called "Desk," then in future it will almost certainly launch it on a .microsoft domain (presumably desk.microsoft). So it makes sense for Google to know that if people are searching "Microsoft desk" that the domain ending in .microsoft is far more likely to be the best choice.

A second reason why a dot-brand domain will have a distinct advantage over, say, dot-coms, is that it is impervious to SEO efforts. Google spends an enormous amount of time and effort in a cat-and-mouse game with website operators. The operators figure out how Google's algorithm works and change their websites to match; Google identifies patterns of behavior and changes its algorithm to catch out such behavior. And so on.

With brand domain names, Google can know that a particular domain is not cleverly built with SEO tools to trick it. That makes Google's job easier and provides better responses to its users. It could also bring down the amount of online scams, which often use well-known brand names to fool people into believing they are legitimate.

This is what Google has to say about dot-brands currently:

Q: Will a .BRAND TLD be given any more or less weight than a .com?
A: No. Those TLDs will be treated the same as other gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.

Again, while there are so few dot-brand domains (in fact almost none), this approach is hardly surprising, but we would be very surprised not to see it change in the next few years.