Don’t expect your fancy new top-level domain to give you an SEO boost, says Google

With companies now able to apply to use their own brand as a top-level domain (TLD), there have been suggestions that doing this might be an easy way to get a boost in search-engine rankings. For example, that Samsung using something like www.phones.samsung might get more hits than the usual samsung.com domain. Not so, says Google … 

In its official webmaster blog, the company says that new top-level domains will be treated exactly like conventional ones.

Our systems treat new gTLDs like other gTLDs (like .com & .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search […] they won’t have more weight or influence in the way we crawl, index, or rank URLs.

Google says exactly the same is true for internationalized domain names, which use language-specific alphabets like Arabic or Chinese (for example, .みんな), but it will do some geotargeting for country-specific TLDs like .uk and .ae.

Most country code TLDs result in Google using these to geotarget the website; it tells us that the website is probably more relevant in the appropriate country.

The company says that region or city TLDs like .london and .bayern won’t currently be geotargeted, but that this may change further down the line.