Since the launch of the dot com domain extension, several new extensions have been introduced. In particular, .org, .net, .biz, .info, as well as country-specific extensions. Many people in the internet marketing community believe that you can rank better in search engine results if you have a .com and it is very difficult to rank with that .info. This is a myth, and has been tested by Google.

When a search engine calculates a site’s ranking, it doesn’t take into account the domain extension. You could rank just as well with an .info domain as you would a .com domain. The argument used by those who take the opposite view is that every time you do a search, .com extensions always show up higher in search engine results than .biz and .info sites. While this is true, there is a perfectly valid reason why this usually happens, and it has nothing to do with the domain extension, but rather the webmaster of that site.

Sites with .com extensions tend to be older and therefore have created more content and backlinks than .biz and .info sites, which are newer extensions. Any site other than a.com is likely to be a younger site and therefore there is less chance of the site ranking well because of this. Google also gives higher rankings to domains that have been registered for a long time. Second, .info and .biz sites have been offered special deals by domain registration sites, sometimes costing as little as 99 cents to register the domain for a year. Understandably, this appealed to people with a small budget, who probably weren’t all that committed to making their site a success. As such, their websites did not have much to write home about and consequently suffered in search engine rankings.

It is only because of these factors that search engines may appear to give .biz and .info domains a lower priority, and it has nothing to do with the domain extension itself. If you put a content-rich site with relevant backlinks on a .biz or .info domain, it would rank just as well as any other domain extension.

So the next time you discover a niche with great potential, don’t give it up because you can’t register one of the ‘big three’ domain extensions. Take what’s available, build a great site, and watch the search engine visitors flood in.