In a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog a couple of days ago, there were several questions asked and answered about Google’s treatment of websites that use new gTLD domain name extensions. I had already understood how Google treats new gTLD extensions, but I wasn’t really sure about how Google would treat .brand domain names, such as .Google or .Barclays domain names.
In the aforementioned blog post, a question about .brand domain names was posed and answered:
Q: Will a .BRAND TLD be given any more or less weight than a .com?
A: No. Those TLDs will be treated the same as a other gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.
If a .brand domain name doesn’t have any more weight than any other TLD, what is the advantage of using it? I would imagine there could be added trust with a .brand domain name because a consumer should know that the brand operates the extension and it’s less likely to be a phishing site or a site offering counterfeit goods. However, at least at this point in time, I don’t think consumers would know enough about the new extensions to understand this yet.
With that being said, I think there are quite a few disadvantages for a brand to use a new gTLD extension:
