The Power of Developing Generic Domains
Feb 18th, 2009 by Richard
Everyone talks about generic domains being the best, buy generic domains if you can afford it, generic domains get more type in traffic, blah blah blah.
Let’s consider for a moment that the true value of a generic domain is one thing and one thing only - TRUST.
Search Engines
Ask anyone who has done full development of generic domains and they’ll tell you that the SE’s rank generics higher than their competitors. David Castello has said it time and again.
The city.com that we developed ranks #3 in google for our generic term behind the government web site and a wiki listing. We have them both in our sites and we’ll rank #1 soon.
Visitors
Visitors love to see generics in search results. If you do a search in the SE’s for “palm springs” and the top 3 web sites are: palm-springs.org, palmsprings.com and a wiki page, which one do you instinctively click — palmsprings.com of course.
The behaviour is the same for any search term - visitors instinctively trust the generic domain listings.
We get about 15,000 clicks from google every month when visitors find the listings for our geo domain. How’s that for trust from visitors?
Advertisers
Selling directly to advertisers is never going to be easier when you represent the generic term domain name. Advertisers immediately respect you and will pay more for advertising because they trust the brand.
Why charge $300 per year for advertising on a non-generic domain when advertisers will pay $300 per month for an ad on the generic .com site?
Linking Partners
Getting back links and linking partners for a generic .com is extremely easy. More often than not, linking parters are happy to provide more than one link to the generic name. Just ask for a deep link to your relevant content while you’re at it - they’re much more valuable than a link to your home page.
Free Links
And of course there are all those free links you will get from bloggers, newspapers, wiki sites etc. Every time someone writes an article about a city like, say, Palm Springs, the author instinctively thinks that the authority site must be palmsprings.com and they’ll provide a link such as “for more information on the Palm Springs area, visit palmsprings.com”.
Yep, the author won’t be listing palm-springs.org in his article even if it does rank #1 in google today!
Summing it up
TRUST me - if you are going after a niche and don’t own the generic .com domain, then the first thing on your list should be to buy that domain.
You will get more visitors to your site and make more money from advertisers in the long run.
[This article is PART 2 of a multi-part series sharing an inside look at the start to finish development of a city.com domain. Future articles will cover content generation, automation, SEO, linking, revenue, ranking and more]
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“ask for a deep link to your relevant content while you’re at it - they’re much more valuable than a link to your home page”
I was not aware of this, I had assumed it was better to get multiple links to the homepage rather than spreading across the site.
@Phil,
I’ll cover linking in a separate article, but nope, get as many deep linking back links as you can to your content. i.e. get a link from a hotel site directly to your hotel page on your site, instead of a link to your home page.
Richard is right. Link building with a link ratio of around 60/40 or 70/30 or some other similar ratio of home page links to internal page links looks a lot more natural than getting 100% of your external links to point directly to your home page.