New gTLD

I was reading Techmeme this morning where I learned about a new startup called Public, which was written about in Variety. Before reading the entire article, I hovered over the first mention of Public to see what domain name they are using for this venture. Interestingly, they chose to use a new gTLD domain name for its website:  Public.chat.

Public was founded by Avner Ronen, an experienced Internet entrepreneur. Here’s how the Variety article described what Public is and does:

“Public, which launched with an iPhone app and website Friday, can best be described as group chats with an audience. A few active participants chat with each other on a topic, be it “Game of Thrones,” a sports team or “Black Arts & Literature.” All these discussions happen in public, allowing anyone to follow them in real-time or read up on them later. And chats can be embedded on other websites as well as shared via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.”

It  is neat that the company chose

As an industry, we should probably stop using SEO as an “advantage” in new gTLDs. It’s proving not to be necessary or advantageous for us when we do that. If SEO or PPC benefits are fair, the same, or slightly better in some cases, that’s all we really need. I think it should be a side-point.

A recent sponsored post by Rightside on the Search Engine Land website stated in the title that a lawyer “discovered that migrating from a .com to a .attorney domain can drive organic traffic and save on SEM costs”. Although I don’t doubt the veracity of any statement in the article, this is the second time an article like that stirred Google to respond in a way that undermines industry credibility. It happened before in 2012 when Adrian Kinderis titled and article, “New top-level domains to trump .com in Google search results”. Matt Cutts responded very publicly, within a day or two, stating, “Sorry, but that’s just not true…” This time a rebuke was issued seven days later on the exact same website where the sponsored post appeared. There have been a few other discrediting rebukes like this in between. You would think, as an industry, that we have learned by now.

I’d like to point out that Bill Hartzer’s research at Globerunner is fair

During the last few years (and maybe even longer than that) there has been considerable speculation about how Google looks at domain name extensions. This afternoon, Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz wrote an interesting article pertaining to how Google looks at the extensions when it comes to new gTLD keywords.

Here’s an excerpt of what was shared in the article  (read the full article for more information and background about this):

“Google’s John Mueller confirmed yesterday in a Google Hangout that keyword-rich TLDs, such as the new top-level domains that have keywords in them — like .LIVE, .NEWS, .ATTORNEY and so on — do not count for ranking purposes. Mueller said Google completely ignores that for ranking purposes.”

The article cited comments made in  a Google Hangout, which I embedded below. Schwartz referenced specific