Domain Name Speculation: Worth Your Time? Money? Business?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

The dot com marketing is saturated. It seems that all the best domain names using that TLD have been used up. Of course, due the evergrowing and changing nature of the web, there will always be domain names that pop up on the radar screen as valuable and untaken. But the longer we go on the way we have, the less likely that is to occur. It has some people speculating that other TLDs may become valuable in the future.

One of the domain names being talked about as a potential haven for investors is .travel. That could be because everyone in every country has an interest in that subject. But will it ever catch on the way that .com has?

One sure way to know whether a domain TLD has any potential or not is to see if any search results return that TLD with respectable rankings. If you query “travel answers” in Google you’ll see that www.answers.travel ranks No. 3. That’s a pretty good sign. The downside is you also get a message alongside the listing that “This site may harm your computer.”

Still, that the TLD appears that high in the search results is a good sign where search engine optimization is concerned. How often do you see TLDs appear that high that do fit into the .com, .net, .org, or .co.uk extension families?

Interestingly, all of the top 10 search results for the “travel answers” search query return the dire warning that your computer could be harmed if you click the link. Could there be some manipulation of search results going on there? I’ll let you decide, but the question remains, “Will non-.com TLDs ever be valuable?” Will we ever see a day when it will be commonplace to register a .travel TLD, or another domain name with a TLD net yet available? Will .SEO ever be a valuable TLD?

These questions are important to search engine optimizers because we live in a dot com world. And until other TLDs are treated equally by the search engines that matter, thee will always be a limit on the valuable real estate that is available.