Lot’s of grumblings lately it seems in the blog-o-sphere regarding .info domains…
.info domains are a double-edged sword it seems in that they’re incredibly cheap (you can get them at most registrars like GoDaddy for $1.99 right now and they were recently as low as $0.99) and they seem to be drawing the ire of the almighty Google search engine.
Guys Google ain’t dumb…
They know what internet marketers, affiliate marketers and black hatters are doing with .info domains… particularly what black hatters are doing with .info domains.
This is why I say you should always be aware of what your competitors are doing to market and promote their websites…
If you don’t know what black hatters are doing with .info domains they’re basically buying them up by the hundreds (yes hundreds) and they’re putting Adsense Ads on them… basically they’re mass-building Made For Adsense sites and then they’re pointing hundreds and sometimes thousands of links from their Blog networks at their .info domains to move them quickly up the search engine rankings.
There are also many other internet marketers that are using .info domains to build up BANS sites by the hundred also…
Google sees this and basically now if you own a .info domain Google will make you go through the ringer to prove to them that your .info domain is a legit site and not a spam site like Google is assuming it is.
If you ask me I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future Google had a separate sandbox of something like 12-18 months for .info domains…
My experience with .info domains…
I like to test stuff… new software, new scripts, new site-builders and .info domains are the perfect place for me to try these things some times…
Right now I have about 25 .info domains but within a few weeks I plan on having up to 50. I’m building them up with BANS or Store Stacker Stores (I add SS stores to WordPress Blogs). With all the negatives surrounding .info domains why am I still wasting time with them?
I never jumped on the Blogger Blog or the Squidoo Lens or the Hub Pages band wagon and basically I rather build something on a .info domain that I own then on somebody else’s platform where I have absolutely no control over it.
And at the end of the day I’m paying like an average of $1.50 for these .info domains to register them for a year and if I can’t make that in a year then it’s time for me to go back to work…
I also think that after time I can convince Google or any other search engine that my .info domain is a quality site worthy of a good ranking.
If you have the money buy a .com domain
You’re only saving $8 or $9 on the .info domain registration for the first year and then the following year it’ll probably kick back up to $10/year so in most cases it makes the most sense to just go ahead and pay a few more bucks for a more valuable .com domain name.
