I’m often asked about earning cash from .info domains since I have several of them. People want to know if search engines, especially Google, treats them differently or penalize them and what should you be aware of when purchasing them. In this article, I’m going to cover some of these questions.

First of all, why would you buy a .info domain rather than the .com/.org/.net? There are two main reasons a .info domain is attractive, the first year price and getting an exact keyword match.

Cheap .info Domains

The first year price for a .info domain is typically somewhere between 79 cents and $1.99 depending on the domain registrar and their pricing plans. This means that you can usually buy 10-12 .info domains for the same price as a single .com/.org/.net. If you’re wanting to kick off a lot of niche marketing sites this is a good way to build a nice network of them quickly without spending a lot of money, at least for the first year.

Remember that niche marketing is a numbers game and the more numbers you have the higher your probability of finding successful niches will be. So, buying 20 .info domains will allow you to cover more territory and 100 even more. The flipside is that you’ve got to cover the territory you’ve purchased. If you can’t handle promoting 20+ domains then it may be a better investment for you to stick with 2 domains that you can deal with and grow your niche network more gradually.

Another thing to remember is that the renewal fee for a .info domain is just about the same as it is for other domain types. This means that you have a year to get your .info domain earning cash. Let’s say you bought 100 .info domains at 79 cents from GoDaddy during a sale, a total investment of $79. Your total renewal cost will be $799 at their discount price and $1069 at the regular price. A good performing niche site will make an average of $1 a day, so it’s obvious that you would want to renew a domain that was bringing in $365 a year. However, even if you’re only making a few dollars a month from a domain it’s paying its way and is probably worth renewing. You’ll need to figure out your break even point based on your business needs.

Exact Keyword Match

The other main reason to buy a .info domain is to get an exact keyword match. This is considered important by some for SEO purposes. While having the exact match can help it’s not nearly as important as having keyword anchored incoming links and having keyword relevant content. With a little good SEO work you can make ner1u-pkzn-fdx.com rank for ‘little green widgets’. You can do a search on ‘make money online’ and see several examples of non-keyword matched sites. However, having the exact keyword match can give you a slight advantage so if you’re splitting your work between 20, 50, 100+ domains every little bit helps.

Often you’ll find that the .com/.org/.net for a particular keyword have already been purchased, typically by domainers who have no interest in developing the domain. Since the resell value of .info domains is less, they don’t buy them so the .info is usually available. So, if the ‘big 3′ aren’t available and parked, going for a .info that you plan to develop as a niche site is a good strategy.

Sometimes though you’ll run across a domain name where the exact match .com has been around a while and is well developed. This will be tough to beat unless you’re willing to invest considerable time and resources in promoting your domain. If you’re working a fast moving niche marketing model this may not be the best use of your time but it may be a potential strategy for a long term flagship site. However, based on human, not SEO, factors, I’d suggest going with a different .com/.org name that’s a partial match for flagship sites.

Does Google Penalize .info Domains?

As I noted above, SEO basically breaks down to having the right kinds of incoming links and having relevant content that search engine algorithms can correctly analyze and categorize.

To Google, the domain extension doesn’t seem to matter. Of course, their engineers are the only ones who know for sure and they’re not talking, but from what I’ve observed the same factors that will cause a .com/.net/.org to rank or not rank apply to .info sites equally. If you think about it, Google’s stated goal is to provide quality search results for searchers. If they did a blanket penalty to .info domains this could result in less relevant search results.

There are two main things that cause some confusion in the area. First, a while ago for less than a day, Google accidentally didn’t include .info domains in search results because of a programming glitch. This defect was found rather quickly and corrected. Yes, even Google’s top programmers will have a bug slip into production software from time to time. The other was an offhand comment by Matt Cutts where he was lamenting GoDaddy selling .infos for 99 cents at the time. He didn’t indicate that there would be any penalty for these new domains, just that it was going to increase his department’s workload because they would have to be on the lookout for more spam sites. They’ve apparently done this by adding contract visual inspectors to their web spam team and haven’t had a need to use any blindly applied penalties. Think about it. While 99 cents may be cheap, $10 isn’t all that expensive either, and spamming and blackhatting occurs on all domain types.

Basically, my point is that .info’s don’t face any extra hurdles as compared to other domain extensions when it comes to SEO.

When I took time to do a little research, I found that there are a lot of authority .info domains out there that rank well for competitive keywords, such as these…

Metropolitan Transportation Authority
Regular Expressions
Google PageRank Checker

Also, the viability and capability of .info domains to perform well was recently demonstrated with the launch of ‘Move Your Money‘. This brand new .info domain was conceived during a 2009 Christmas Eve dinner party by Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post and her guests. They wanted to create a site to promote moving your banking business from the big mega-banks to local banks and credit unions. They purchased the domain that evening and the site went live a few days later. Within a few days, the brand new domain had killer authority links not only from Huff Post but from MSN/MSNBC and many other authority sites. As you would expect, it started ranking well. There are tons of SEO lessons to be learned and SEO myths to be dispelled from that site alone.

So, why does the impression persist that there is an across-the-board penalty applied to .info domains?

First of all, I think that the low initial price plays mentally into one’s commitment to developing and promoting the domain. Let’s face it, you’re more likely to take spending $10 more seriously than spending 79 cents. Plus, if you’ve purchased several .infos you’ll be splitting your time and effort between them. If you’re not a good time manager you may end up neglecting sites and not promoting them well. If you want to have a viable .info you have to mentally treat it like you would a .com.

Another mental factor is that it is easier for someone to blame the failure of a niche site to thrive on it being a .info rather than placing the blame where it belongs. That blame usually belongs on the webmaster because they failed to promote the site well by getting quality links and by using other potential marketing channels. Or perhaps the wrong keywords were selected and the niche is either too competitive or lacks buying traffic. Think about it. Which is easier to tell yourself? That your niche site failed because it was a .info and it’s Google’s fault or that it failed because you didn’t bother to get good solid links for it or you picked the wrong keywords?

Next, since .infos are commonly used by “churn and burn” spammers and blackhatters as well as for thin affiliate sites they tend to have a checkered past, especially for common search terms and product types/names. Domains that have been used in the past for BANS (Build A Niche Store), YACG (Yet Another Content Generator) or other such scripts can be notoriously difficult to get reindexed even if they’ve been deleted from the domain registration database. It is important though to understand that this problem can apply to any domain type, not just .infos. When you’re purchasing a new domain it’s essential to do some quick research to make sure that the domain is clean and hasn’t been used for any activities that might cause you problems. It seems that Google has a long memory when it comes to these abused domains, perhaps longer than they should since it extends to the new owner.

Lastly, people do often purchase .info domains in bulk to build thin affiliate autogenerated sites. In the past, some people have advocated this as a method to make money online. In most cases, Google hates this kind of generated site (that is unless it’s being funded by the big Silicon Valley venture capital firm down the road from the Google HQ). They will usually deindex it when they discover it. Once again, this isn’t domain type specific. You can get a .com deindexed for being a thin affiliate autogenerated site just as fast as you can a .info. If you’re going to create sites that might be classified as MFA (Made For Adsense or Made For Affiliate) you do need to understand the risks involved as well as the potential rewards.

Marketing Factors with .info Domains

Probably the biggest problem with .info domains don’t have anything to do with SEO, which is essentially computer algorithms at work, but with fuzzier human factors.

People have come to expect a business to use a .com and a non-profit organization to use .org. Branding with a .info is more difficult and could result in customer confusion. So, if you’re building a flagship site or a business/organization presence site, then, yes, you want a .com or .org even if you don’t get an exact keyword match. Remember that we’re talking human perception here, not SEO. I think that eventually you’ll see .info domains become more common in branding, just as branded .net domains are becoming more and more common now. Also, if you’re buying a .com for branding purposes, I’d highly recommend that you spend the extra cash and get the .org, .net and .info at the same time.

Next, you have to consider resell value. Let’s face it, .coms are worth more on the domain market than .infos. If you’re thinking about resell then you have to think .com, simply because of the perception of your potential buyers.

How are search visitors likely to react to a .info? I haven’t seen it make much of a difference on my .info niche marketing sites. In fact, I’ve run parallel .com and .info domains and the results were very similar with both in terms of traffic and conversions. As always, it’s simply a matter of following the standard pattern for developing a niche marketing site that converts well that I’ve gone over in other posts here.

Final Thoughts

OK, I’ve rambled on a bit here but the bottom line is that for niche site marketing, .info domains have certain advantages and disadvantages. As long as you take these factors into account you will be able to earn online cash with .info domains.

Frank Carr January 28th, 2010 SEO

SEO
anchored links, BANS, branding, domain extensions, exact keyword match, Google, indexing, info domains, Made for Adsense, Made For Affiliate, MFA, Niche Marketing, renewal fee, resell, search engine algorithms, thin affiliate site, YACG