GuruBobsBlog.com has moved to GuruBob.co
Posted on April 04, 2010 by GuruBob
“When you have completed 95 percent of your journey, you are only halfway there.” – Japanese Proverb
It has been a while since I last posted and there has been quite a lot of water under the bridge since then. The 2nd Coming Home seminar has come and gone as well as an internal 30DC workshop where we discussed and planned for the 2010 30DC. All of these events were distractions but never the less I had hoped to find the time to continue posting before now.
All of a sudden an interesting opportunity arose as Ed Dale and myself were approached by the domain registry (cointernet.co) for the soon to be released .co domain to participate in their co-founder opportunity. What this meant is that we were given early access to a .co domain as co-founders and to that end Ed has relocated his blog onto eddale.co and I decided to move gurubobsblog.com onto gurubob.co.
What is the .co domain you might ask and where has it come from.
Well, for some time now, the Colombian domain suffix has been .com.co and has been the preserve of mostly Colombian companies. Given the attractiveness of the .co suffix and it’s connotations for companies and communities and the like, a decision was made to change the Colombian domain suffix to a second level type and so the .co domain is being released to the world. At present, an application is being made for the .co domain to be treated as a global domain (rather like the .tv domain) by Google which would mean that it could be geotargetted to any region at the initiative of the domain owner.
So why would I want to move my blog on gurubob.co?
The main reason is keyword specificity. In a perfect world, I would have been able to acquire gurubob.com but that has been unavailable for many years so it seemed a great opportunity to get gurubob.co. Secondly, not having to add an extra word to the domain means that the relative keyword density in the domain is higher and the overall domain name has fewer characters thereby being easier to remember and quicker to type. I do think that when the .co domains go on general availability on the 20th of July 2010 that many people will consider a .co domain for these reasons.
The only hesitation I had was in relation to moving the existing WordPress blog onto a new domain and while it did offer some challenges it wasn’t too bad. Some of the things I learnt about moving the blog were interesting including an easy to apply site-wide re-direction of the old site to the new site and I’ll write about them in my next post.
At this time, only co-founders have access to a .co domain but over the next few weeks trademark holders will be able to apply to reserve domains that relate to their trademark. There will be an opportunity to go into an auction for popular domain names from mid-june to early July with general availability starting on the 20th July. It is possible to pre-register for a .co domain at Go Daddy.
That’s it for now. I’m interested to see how Google will treat the blog now it has been moved to GuruBob.co and will report on that in future posts but I do think the .co domain may offer a tremendous opportunity in the near future for people to acquire highly keyword specific domains that will hopefully be treated as global domains that in time will be able to compete on equal terms with .com domains.
It is as it is.
GuruBob
ps if you would like to find out more about the Co-Founders program in relation to the .co domain then click here to visit the cointernet.co web site.
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kevin Taylor
- 5th Apr, 10 01:04pm
Hi Bob, now that I have read about your .co–I would also like to do the same with my name for my own blog. I have tried my name in many different ways and thought here is a chance to get my full name out there. I was wondering if you have had yours out there long enough to find out if Google is treating as global equal to .com. See ya in San Diego if you are going?
Kevin
Kevin
Susan @ New Niche Finder
- 5th Apr, 10 04:04pm
I look forward to seeing how this plays out. Certainly worth keeping an eye on.
Question…why do you think .co will do better than .biz or any of the others for that matter? As near as I can tell the only domains getting in the top 10 based on domain name are .com, .net and .org. Why do you think this one is going to be different?
Thanks
Susan
Len
- 19th Apr, 10 12:04am
Hey Rob,
Just how important is keyword density when it comes to domain names?
I was having a debate over this with an associate of mine a few days ago and we couldn’t really come up with a straight answer.
Appreciate your feedback!
Brian
- 19th Apr, 10 08:04am
Hi Bob,
Thank you for covering this. I was trying to figure out why you and Ed Dale made the move and was not able to find much information on .co
Brian
GuruBob (author comment)
- 19th Apr, 10 01:04pm
Len,
The most important thing is that your main keyword is in the domain. Having said that, logically it would be better if ONLY the keyword were in the domain leading to the highest relative keyword density. Hence, gurubob.co would seem better than gurubobsblog.com; both contain the keyword gurubob but gurubob.co has the highest keyword density and would therefore logically have offer the most relevance from an SEO perspective. Which, of course, is one of the main reasons why I decided to move the blog from gurubobsblog.com to gurubob.co once the opportunity became available.
GuruBob
Jewish Artist
- 4th May, 10 06:05am
Hi Guru Bob, Can you make a prediction whether the .co will become competitive with the .com sufix? And would it be worth it to buy up a bunch of money .co domains- like credit.co?
Edmund Pelgen
- 18th Jul, 10 06:07am
Hi Rob, I’m looking at this in detail with the general release coming up. The only question I have for you is how will the .co domain be treated globally for global searches. Based on my testing, “all other things being equal” country level domain names seem to perform better when targeting countries and .com’s perform better for global searches. Even with the Google webmaster tools geo targeting set.
Will .co be any different for competitive keyword phrases globally? I’d hate to get a .co that suffers being categorised as a country domain when competing globally.
Regards
Edmund
Truman Anderson
- 24th Oct, 10 11:10am
I did not realize that adding a word to your keyword phrase diluted the density of the keyword when I added a word to get a dot com domain. Can added words contribute any optimization based on emotional or spiritual appeal?
Aaron
- 19th Jul, 11 10:07pm
Hi Bob,
Great post – thank you.
Now that it has been a year+ since your post, do you still think the .co is being ranked equally to the .com?
I am considering a domain with great keyword density that will heavily rely on SEO for results.
Aaron