Any experience with ranking .CO domains (adult and mainstream)?
 

Looking for a little bit of feedback on the utility of .co domains, and whether or not you've had any trouble ranking them and or branding them.

This would be for a mainstream project, "company" will be part of the branding so it would be a double play on the "Co." extension.

Intended to be an online store for reference, they have some nice clean brandable short domains available in this extension.. Just want to make sure it won't be penalized for having a shit extension. Niche and content will be spot on, done by hand, products will be unique.

Anyone had success with them? Basically I just want to make sure it's a foundation I can build on safely... So any feedback/experience would be greatly appreciated.

:thumbsup

This would be interesting to know. Off hand, I can't imagine any penalties though, especially for mainstream since content is king.

honestly you should be spending your own money to figure this out, but here's some free info anyway:

few years ago I launched 3 copies of a new/custom script on three domains. Two of them .com, with not-particularly-brandable names. One of them on a .co, with a VERY brandable name.

Did all the same SEO to all three.

The .coms did much better than the .co...even though the .co was a premium domain name and the .coms were mediocre at best.

A .CO website has the exact same potential to rank well within search engines, assuming it provides valuable content. In fact, a .CO domain offer a SEO-friendly advantages that a legacy domain does not.

My advice:chose the one with a keyword in domain name. Keyword related to product. a keyword having established monthly search volume.

In case you are still not convinced ( I know majority of webmasters here are sceptical about SEO and that is actually great, leaving space for serious guys), this is an old video:

I hate to hear that..

They have some really clean and simple domains available.. I hope to build the brand so most of the searches will be for exact match purposes.. But don't like to think I might be missing out on perv toy good free traffic and customers.

Also don't like the idea of having to set it manually in webmasters tools.

Bump for any and all experience - and thanks for the feedback fellas :thumbsup

My experience has been that people are used to .com so much that unless you own both .co and.com of the same name your efforts will probably benefit the person that owns the .com (when it comes to branding anyways).

.uk launched a little while ago and I picked up some great names So instead of .co.uk it's just a clean .uk. But so far I haven't seen too much movement on that.

+1

While you may be able to rank in SERPS for the .co, you will definitely lose return visitors who forget the .co TLD and assume the site is at .com.

Those are excellent points.. and will likely clench it for me.

Damn.

Co extension is good because it can pick up typo traffic, people very often forget to type "m" for com domain.