Hi all,

I know .CC doesn't carry the prestige or professionalism of com/net/org, but does it have value for search engine placement?

If I have a commercial site for apples, say, and I get my hands on apples.cc, will that give my site a significant search engine advantage?

Thanks,

Will

The word 'apples' might, however the extension wouldn't. In other words, if you are going this route and trying to get a one word domain, you might as well try to get the cheapest one, heh. :D

So you're saying that search engines DO take the domain name into account in the ranking algorithms. And for that particular factor in the ranking, apples.cc is just as good as apples.com?

Well, I couldn't confirm that. Just for some examples, I typed 'apples' into google. Quite a range of pages and URLs turned up, on the first few pages the URL seemed to have not much to do with it, and apple.com wasn't #1. Next, 'business' which again seemed to be a range, although many sites with business in the URL, again business.com not #1, though it was on the first page. Last I typed in 'porsche' and porsche.com was #1, and on the next few search pages, many porsche.something came up (quite a few actually).

So just from this very unscientic test, I'm not sure google at least takes this into consideration. With porsche, there was a geocities pages listed in teh top 15 results. Go figure.

(P.S. Will return phone call :D)

The reason I ask is because I picked up web-hosting.cc yesterday and, though no one will type that directly into their browser, I thought it might have some value in getting placed well in a search engine...

Well, there are some sites that deal strictly with search engines which I'd check out. Do I have them handy, ummm, no. Someone here hopefully does. I think at least one was http://searchenginewatch.com

well, a lot of people say that keywords in domain names do not help, but in my experience, they definitely do, and the hyphen helps too.
However these factors on their own do not guarantee good search engine placement, you still have to get listed in major search directories and get lots of people to link to you. The keywords in domains, simply gives you a tiny edge, and that tiny edge can make all the difference.

In my personal opinion, the extension of your domain name .cc, will not hinder your placement in search engines, speaking mainly in google. However, it would be an enormous task to get web-hosting.cc into the first page of google results.