Many people will tell you that a dot com domain will gain a higher ranking in search engine results than any other top-level domain.
I’ve found some evidence that tends to back this up. In this article, Distribution of Domain Types, Alexa have published an analysis of the top 65,000 web sites in terms of reach (proportion of web users that visit a given site). It can be clearly seen that dot com domains dominate, getting at least 60% of the reach at any given level.
In EzSEO Newsletter number 119, Andy Williams states his belief that domain names that contain hyphens tend to do less well in the search engines than domain names that do not contain hyphens. He decided to move one of his sites from a hyphenated domain to a non-hyphenated domain using 301 redirects, and he noticed greater indexing by the search engines.
What can be inferred from these two pieces of information? To me, they suggest that the search engines are giving a greater value to dot com domains, which suggest “we were here first;” and the same thing is suggested by non-hyphenated domain names. I will be considering these factors when I develop new web-based projects.
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David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
