Update on My 2 .CO Development Projects

I was asked to provide an update about my Bahamas.CO website, and although I will oblige, I don’t think it’s going to be all that interesting (or helpful) to anyone.

Because of the improved domain sales market, Bahamas.CO hasn’t been updated in 3 years. As a result, I am sure there is little traffic and little Google love. Frankly, Google shouldn’t rank the site well because I haven’t put forth the effort that would be required to rank this website in the competitive travel market. Although I intended to create something far more in depth, my focus shifted on domain sales and maintaining my few profitable websites, and sadly, I built what now amounts to a mini site.

I am confident my .CO development experience would be far different than someone else’s experience if they put the time and effort into building and maintaining a website. There are plenty of companies and people succeeding with .CO domain names, and I don’t think what I’ve done should be indicative of the possibility, especially since Google treats .CO in the same way it treats .com, .net, .org, .TV, .ME….etc. Posting an update would be unfair to anyone who wanted to use that information to evaluate the potential for .CO development.

I do have one other developed .CO website: Elliot.CO. At the moment, when you search Google for “Elliot Silver” this website on a .CO domain name ranks just below my Twitter page in Google, and it ranks higher than the exact match ElliotSilver.com, which is owned by someone else with the same name as me.

I don’t have Google Analytics installed, so I have no idea what the traffic is like, but you can see that it’s in the top 10 Google results for the desired keyword, despite not being an exact match domain name. In fact, Elliot.CO ranks higher than the following respected publications that mention “Elliot Silver:”

  • New York Times
  • Domain Name Wire
  • MO.com interview
  • About.ME page
  • Facebook
  • YouTube

I am not a SEO expert by any stretch, so I can’t speculate on why Elliot.CO ranks well. I did link to it from some of my websites, which is helpful I am sure. However, I haven’t done a whole lot of other work on it. I am sure the fact that the search term is not all that competitive is helpful.

Point is, a .CO domain name can do just fine if you put some effort into it. I failed to put the effort into Bahamas.CO that I should have put into it to succeed. I put more effort into Elliot.CO, and that has paid off with a top 10 Google ranking for my primary keyword.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

27 COMMENTS

  1. After 3 years, I couldn’t help but notice that Bahamas.CO still shows COInternet as the owner in the whois as part of the original ‘Cofounder’ program. Do you expect to gain full ownership of the domain in the (near) future?

  2. You didn’t put time n money into this because you know that it’s not worth it investing into extension . Co ….if if was Bahamas.con then surely you would spent money in it building.

    But am with you it’s not worth it wasting money

    • Don’t make uneducated assumptions about my business. I have many exceptional domain names and I have to pick my battles. I don’t have any more hours in the day than you or anyone else.

      It makes sense to focus on five figure domain sales which takes less time than trying to build a business in the competitive travel space.

    • Not making any assumptions about your business. I am making a valid point, its not worth investing in .co (time and money, developing the sites)

      Its good, you didnt update the sites frequently, which you are mentioning in your post, All I am saying is, that its good you did not udpate the .co sites frequently, because had you done so, it would not work anyway.

    • You made a faulty assumption about why I didn’t develop it further. There are plenty of people who use .CO successfully. I have more important business drivers on which I have been focusing.

      As I mentioned, Elliot.CO is ranking very well for the key term with relatively little work. It’s not a money maker but it serves its purpose.

    • Most of the companies I see using .co have are related to a marketing plan i.e. YOU, or are and investor in the .co.

      If it were Bahamas.com, the traffic would justify developing a website.

      How many other non .com domains have you developed?

  3. I think it’s wise for domain investors to recite this quote every day.

    “You only have to do one thing great in life to be successful.”

    Not saying we shouldn’t have lots of domains, other business ventures, investments, etc. But the best strategy from my observations of the most successful entrepreneurs over the years is picking one venture (at a time) to be your primary focus.

    So what may be an effective approach is to spend some time in really deep thought looking at each of your best domains and then selecting just one to be your crown jewel and the name that will skyrocket you to Internet fame one day. 🙂

  4. @Elliot,

    First of all, let me thank you for posting the update, when you didn’t have to. And of course, we are all grateful for your responsiveness, and activeness, on this blog.

    Though written from a defensive perspective, I believe most can get the gist from the post.

    I am not anti dot Co, or any extension. I simply seek the facts; domain investments is often compared to stocks, and if that’s the case, some people would be mindful on what they say to entice people to invest. Of course the glaring exception in this comparison is that there is no entity, such as Google on the stock side, to pick arbitrary winners and losers with search engine games.

    On a side note, knowing you to be a very astute business man, I doubt very much if you would leave Bahamas.COM not transferred for 3 years, and risk losing it. All these nuggets help us evaluate this thing.

    Again, thanks Elliot.

    • I own the title to the domain name so there’s no rush in transferring it. I trust that they won’t do anything with it just as I trust Escrow.con when I put names in their holding account.

    • I think it would be a bad PR move if something happened to it just like if something happened to a name in escrow with a trusted escrow service.

      The irony is that these comments come three years after I launched the site and it’s still operating. Clearly it isn’t an issue for me.

      If I owned Bahamas.com, I would want it in my account ASAP because I’d be looking to sell it.

    • I don’t see any irony. You’re the original poster.

      It’s clear you don’t care enough about about bahamas.co to bother moving it to you’re own account.

      Developing websites / apps is hard work. Staring with a great .COM is a great head-start.

    • I probably have 10 valuable .COM domain names at random registrars, and I haven’t moved those to my control either. I am not worried about them because there’s a paper trail and I legally own them just like I legally own Bahamas.CO. What you don’t seem to understand is I trust the .CO Registry like I would trust an escrow service.

  5. Since the Sir Elliot’s domain business strategy is buy and sell and it is not doing anything-

    put that Bahamas.CO for auction and see how much it is worth!!!

  6. As you guessed, Elliot.co ranks well because you have linked out from Burbank.com and Dogwalker.com — the domains have high authority in Google, plus you place the link on a high PR page of the site.

    ElliotSilver.com has just two weak links pointing to it and the title description is just “ElliotSilver.com” (would be better if it had “Elliot” separately)

  7. I want to make it clear that I welcome your comments about building on .CO if you have experience with it. You can share positive, negative, or neutral comments.

    However, I don’t want or appreciate speculation, especially as it relates to my building business. I am all for sharing ideas and opinions, but I don’t think unsupported conjecture serves any purpose.

    • What I see here is that people believe that a good dot co in a less competitive space or an excellent dot co domain are worth developing.

      (IMO) if you saw that Bahamas.co was worth your time and money, you would have put more work into developing this website. Many websites with lesser keywords have performed well against top searched sites.

    • As I said before, I have been focusing less on development in the last couple f years. I haven’t really worked on any totally new websites because I haven’t had the need/desire to develop.

      You can see that I own plenty of other domain names with potential that I haven’t touched.

      Just because I know Drafting.com and SpeechWriter.com would be great domain names for a money making websites doesn’t mean I am going to devote time and resources to them. The only reason I am considering the Massachusetts real estate domain name for development is that I have an advertiser ready to pay for a listing before the site is even built.

    • As you said many times before, you prefer dot com domains. It makes sense to focus on developing this extension. IMO, you don’t see real value in the dot co extension. If you did, you would take a risk on fully developing this extension.

      I own 4 dot co domains, all which are taken in all extensions and are searched between 22,500-100,000 exact match. I developed a dot co that produces consistent traffic.

      IMO, I don’t see SpeechWriter.com as a lucrative website. It may hold good value as a domain name (however, low searches), but this website would require extensive work that may not be worth your time. It is better to develop medical and travel domains. Speech writer is not a good domain to develop. It can get boring writing content on a speech writing.

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