Until now domain registration has evolved into a fairly straightforward process (unless of course you're a big business fighting over a trademark), but the announcement from ICANN in the last few weeks has begun to shake up this part of the internet.
Under the new legislation, ICANN has revealed a number of additional top-level domains that are generic in nature, which could conceivably blow open the range of domain names that become available. The cost being mentioned at the moment is around $185,000 per application, which is likely only going to be affordable to major brands and services, but it's probable that the future will see these costs drop, just as the original cost of top-level domains like .com and .co.uk did over the past decade.
The big question is; what does this mean for the SEO industry? I've attempted to draw a few predictions below:
- Keyword URL possibilities - the new TLDs creates the potential to use keywords slightly differently in domain names. For example, a smartphone manufacturer could use the URL smart.phone, or a digital PR agency could use digital.pr.
- Brand-keyword URLs - similarly to the above, it's entirely possible that brands could use the new TLDs to create a direct relationship between the brand and its products. An example of this would be if "Ben and Jerry's" used the URL benandjerrys.icecream.
- Different TLDs will have different levels of authority - at the moment we know that Google broadly prefers .com domains over others such as .info or .biz, with in some geographic cases the exception of regional TLDs such as .co.uk. It may be that search engines will treat the new TLDs in the same way, assigning different levels of authority to each different one.
- Changes to site architecture - the way that different websites arrange themselves could change too. It may be, for example, that "Joe's Shoes" opts for an approach using the new TLDs that is akin to having subdomains, i.e. "shoes.joesshoes", "boots.joesshoes" etc. This could also result in a different approach to global website optimization, using geography based TLDs such as "uk.joesshoes".
- Necessity - depending on how it takes off, we may find that using the new TLDs becomes imperative for search success. How Google's algorithm defines the authority behind the new TLDs remains to be seen, but should the new ones become more common in the future then many websites may need to consider a switch.
My guess is that this will of course change rapidly as time progresses, but these are just a few early predictions. From the perspective of an SEO agency or in house search marketing manager, it's certainly something to keep an eye on, with a view to integrating any new best practices that develop into the strategies and tactics to be implemented for SEO value.
Whatever the case, £185k remains a lot for a domain, so the commercial benefit will certainly need to be clear...