Top Level Domains: A Pricey Future in Optimization?
How much is a keyword in your URL worth? If money is no object, how does $185,000 sound? ICANN, the governing body of domain registration, has proposed this as the price for buying a new top-level domain (TLD). So instead of www.thehatstore.com being your website’s URL, that’s the cost to enable you (and conceivably any other haberdasher) to register www.thehatstore.hats, www.cowboy.hats, www.top.hats, and more.
Imagine the appeal of www.nike.shoes, www.ford.trucks, and its eventual impact on Google’s search algorithm as the trend begins to grow. If you can pay the steep entrance fee, you too can get in on the ground level of what may be an interesting new source of optimization. This is especially salient for those in the area of eCommerce, where a seller may specialize in a particular area of products, but have a multitude of different types of products. Therefore, instead of having one large, cluttered website for selling a vast array of candy, www.thecandystore.com could build or buy a scalable eCom model that is implemented across a series of websites, such as halloween.candy, easter.candy, hard.candy, chocolate.candy, and more.
What would this lend to an eCommerce business model? Each of these sites could improve their focus on a larger series of keywords for each sub-area of candy without diluting or convoluting the content of their website. Indexability and keyword salience are both major problems for these business models. Splitting the site on sensible points of cleavage would be a viable solution given the current state of search engines. The top-level domains would be even more informative to the semantic content of the site, just as it is assumed now that “.edu” domains are EDUcational and “.org” domains are ORGanizations.
In the future, it may be valuable for professional organizations in specific areas of selling, reselling, and services to pool together their resources to buy these top-level domains for the good of all of its clients, who may then have the opportunity to participate in the race for the best domain names within these top-level domains.
