Difference Between TLDs: Build Better Websites

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If you are planning on creating a website, You need to know which domain extension is right for you as there are many TLDs to chose from. Also, whenever you try to buy a domain from a Domain Registration company such as NameCheap(Most Popular) or Go Daddy, you might find that some TLDs are on sale at a low price or even free for the first year with hosting. But you have to understand that cheap is not always good for you and different TLDs are good for different purposes. So, I am writing this article to help you understand the Difference Between TLDs or top level domain extensions.

Difference Between TLDs

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How Many TLDs are there?

It will surprise you to learn that there are many top level domain extensions. In fact, as of 2015, you can divide TLDs into six different categories. They are:

  1. Infrastructure Domain,
  2. Generic Domains,
  3. Restricted domains, 
  4. Sponsored domains,
  5. Country Code domains,
  6. Test domains.

In the early days of the internet, back in 1998, we only had a few domain extensions to chose from which were .com, .org, .net, .int, .edu, .gov, and .mil. These were used for commercial, organization, networking, international, educational, government and military websites. But, now there are 100s of these infrastructural TLDs out there.

Generic domain names often contain generic words such as, .apartments, .army, .best, .biz, .camera, .coupon, .dental, .group, .host and the list goes on. .gov and .mil are restricted domain extensions and are only available for government websites and military respectively. Sponsored TLDs such as .edu are mix of both generic and treaditional TLDs because they are generic TLDs but only one organization can issue them. Country code domains use short from of a countries name and they are great for local visitors.

You can check this list to learn about all of them.

In this article we are going to talk about the best top level domain extensions to use for your next website and worst TLDs to avoid at any cost.

Difference Between TLDs: Which TLDs to avoid and which one to pick

Even though google says domain extensions has little to no effect on SEO, that’s not the reality. It is true that google treats most TLDs equally but googles algorithm will not. There is a good reason for it. The search engine would not want to send its users to websites that can potentially be associated with spam. And because of that the algorithm makes sure extensions that are usually associated with spams are handled differently. So, even if you are running a legitimate website with one of those extensions, it will hurt your SEO.

According to Spamhaus.org These are currently the The 10 Most Abused Top Level Domain

1 .work Badness Index: 6.29 Domains seen: 102,173
Bad domains: 58,514 (57.3%)

2 .ryukyu Badness Index: 4.54 Domains seen: 167
Bad domains: 151 (90.4%)

3 .surf Badness Index: 4.37 Domains seen: 1,620
Bad domains: 1,021 (63.0%)

4 .okinawa Badness Index: 4.04 Domains seen: 412
Bad domains: 293 (71.1%)

5 .biz Badness Index: 3.41 Domains seen: 30,557
Bad domains: 11,186 (36.6%)

6 .cn Badness Index: 3.23 Domains seen: 160,839
Bad domains: 48,194 (30.0%)

7 .cam Badness Index: 3.23 Domains seen: 5,206
Bad domains: 2,187 (42.0%)

8 .fit Badness Index: 3.10 Domains seen: 6,804
Bad domains: 2,675 (39.3%)

9 .press Badness Index: 2.65 Domains seen: 5,683
Bad domains: 1,982 (34.9%)

10 .gq Badness Index: 2.62 Domains seen: 12,339
Bad domains: 3,902 (31.6%)

Data Source: https://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/

As you can see from the list above, it would be unwise to use any of the listed TLDs if you are planning on building a website to drive traffic from google or other search engines. They can be good for other types of websites where you don’t need to drive traffic from search engines. Besides search engines, users who had a bad experience with a domain name extension similar to you own might not take yours seriously.

Now that the bad ones are out, lets talk about the good ones.

.com The King of Domain Extensions

.com is called the king of domain extensions and it deserves the title. It is the most popular and widespread TLD. It is used for marketing, search and web optimization. .com is one of the first five domain extensions that has been around from the beginning of the internet. .com also have a reasonable price and renew fee in most popular websites from 5-15$ at most. More ever, .com is the most SEO friendly and Adsense favored domain extension.

Even though google doesn’t say it directly, everyone knows that you should wait at least 1 month to apply for Adsense. However, if it is a .com website then you can get Adsense approved even earlier. My website was only 19 days old when I got Adsense approval. but I have seen people getting it even earlier with .com.

Some other good TLDs are .net and .org. They are also one of the first few domain names. However, .net is best for network or telecommunication related websites. Mostly different kind of organizations use .org. So, it is not the best choice for commercial purposes. Also .net and .org are slightly more expensive then .com extension.

Now, you have to decide. If you want to build a regular commercial website for blogging or e-commerce or anything, .com is the only good choice.

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1 thought on “Difference Between TLDs: Build Better Websites”

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