Promotion Q & A

Mary C. | 18 November 2004 |

Promotion Q&A
Jason Schmahl, Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

When I purchased my domain name, I couldn’t get “.com” name, I could only get “.net”. Will this affect my search engine rankings?
The short answer is no. A “.com” domain holds absolutely no ranking advantage over a “.net” one. Each suffix is on the same level as far as search engines are concerned. However, it should be noted that in the common eye, “.com” may indeed have more name recognition. Most people who peruse the internet will assume that a URL ends in “.com”, so it may be a benefit to have the more common suffix.

Someone from Italy just e-mailed me to request a link exchange. Is this spam, or would you recommend setting up the link?
This may or may not be spam. Whether or not to set up the link depends upon the quality and recognition of the website the person wants to link from. If the website that the person would like to link from has a high page rank by Google Standards (that is 5/10 or better), it may indeed be worth linking to. If it is less than that (4/10 or worse), I recommend against linking to the site because it may decrease your own page rank.