The Introduction of New Generic Top Level Domains and the Possible Effects to Brand Owners
The introduction of New Generic Top level Domains or ngTLDs is building a lot of concerns to various
Internet marketers around the globe. Though most Internet marketers are not yet sure about the possible
impacts of the new generic top-level domains, brand owners are already starting to think about a new domain strategy.
A generic top-level domain is considered as a category of Top-level Domains (TLP). These TLDs are maintained by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and they are being used on the Internet for the Domain Name System. In layman’s term, these are the suffixes that you will often see on the URLs of websites like domain names .hotel, .web, etc.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) made a surprising announcement on the introduction of ICANN new gTLDs. According to the announcement, the first new gTLDs will go live on the Internet for as early as August 28, 2013. The first registrations will probably start on September 28, 2013.
Together with the announcement of new gTLDs application, it seems like Google already made some updates on its Algorithm. It means that from now on, Internet marketers will see a few changes on the search engine especially on the traffic generated by different websites with a generic TLD. As we all know, Google gives more importance to websites that are using generic TLDs like .com, .net, and more. However, the new update of Google’s algorithm made it possible for some ccTLDs to have the same weight as generic TLDs. It means that if you are using ccTLDs for your website and it is included on the recent algorithm update of Google, your website will get traffic from outside of your country. The only concern here is that most businesses paid more on generic top level domains to get more traffic to their websites. It implies that this update can create a bigger competition for the users of gTLDs. This is quite beneficial to the people who obtained ccTLDs because their websites will now get more traffic outside their host countries.
Until now, most of the Internet marketers and SEO professionals are still unsure of the possible effects of these changes on the top level domain. Since Google is also updating their algorithm slowly, most professionals suspect that Google will be giving more weight to the new generic top level domains in the future. It is still unclear on how the search engines will handle the changes on the gTLDs, so most of the brand owners are starting to do their research while waiting for new announcements and new updates.