Google Chrome handles new TLDs badly

Sint Maarten’s new .sx country-code top-level domain has been online for at least a couple months now, but Google’s Chrome browser appears to be still a bit wary of it.

Typing “registry.sx” and “nic.sx” into Chrome’s combined URL/search bar today, instead of being sent to my chosen destination I was instead sent to a page of Google search results.

The browser presented the message “Did you mean to go to http://registry.sx?”.

Once my intentions were confirmed, Chrome bounced me to the registry’s web site and seemed to remember my preference on future visits. Other Chrome users have reported the same behavior.

Chrome is understood to use the Public Suffix list to figure out what is and isn’t a domain, and .sx does not currently appear on that list.

Internet Explorer and Firefox (also a Public Suffix list user) both seem already to resolve .sx names normally.

While not a massive problem for .sx, which has just a handful of second-level domains active, new gTLD applicants might want to pay attention to this kind of thing.

Chrome has a significant share of the browser market – about 15% by some counts, as high as 38% by others.

Launching a new gTLD without full browser support could look messy. Chrome isn’t blocking access to .sx, but its handling of the new TLD is not particularly graceful.

Imagine a scenario in which you’ve just launched your dot-brand, and instead of arriving at your web site Chrome users are instead directed to Google (with the top sponsored result a link you’ve probably paid for).

ICANN is currently pondering ways to promote the universal acceptance of TLDs for precisely this reason.

Searches for the pop producer Will.I.Am prompt Chrome to attempt to find an address in the Armenian ccTLD.

Even when the domains are free, Irish small businesses prefer .com to .ie

Irish small businesses overwhelmingly chose .com domains over .ie and .eu during the first year of a Blacknight Solutions web presence freebie initiative.

Blacknight said today signed up 10,000 Irish small business customers through Getting Business Online, a partnership with Google and the local postal service, which it launched a year ago.

The scheme, which Google has been promoting with local partners in various territories around the world, gives companies a free domain and basic web hosting for a year.

According to Blacknight managing director Michele Neylon, 61% of sign-ups chose a .com domain, while 21% chose Ireland’s .ie, 13% chose .eu and 4% chose .biz.

“The way .ie is run, you have to go through an extensive validation process, and it’s also restricted what domains you can register,” Neylon, a regular critic of .ie policy, said.

As the initiative is just a year old, it’s not yet clear how many of these 10,000 companies plan to stick around on paid services.

Facebook gTLD ruled out by ICANN director vote?

While Google recently confirmed its new top-level domain plans, an ICANN director has given a big hint that rival Facebook has not applied for any new gTLDs.

Director Erika Mann, head of EU policy at Facebook in Brussels, voted on ICANN’s “digital archery” method of batching new gTLD applications at the ICANN board meeting March 28.

Because ICANN’s new conflict of interest rules require directors to recuse themselves during votes on matters affecting their own businesses, this could be taken as a pretty strong indication that Facebook is not applying for a new gTLD.

If Mann was aware of a .facebook or other Facebook gTLD bid, I think there’s a pretty strong chance she would have not have participated in the digital archery decision.

At least one director whose employer is believed to have applied for a dot-brand gTLD, IBM’s Thomas Narten, did not attend the March 28 meeting.

Sébastien Bachollet, Steve Crocker, Bertrand de La Chapelle, Ram Mohan, George Sadowsky, Bruce Tonkin, Judith Vazquez, Suzanne Woolf and Kuo-Wei Wu also did not attend.

The March 28 board meeting was the first one with new gTLD program votes that Mann has participated in since the new conflict rules were introduced in December.

The news is obviously a couple of weeks old, but I think it’s worth mentioning now in light of the fact that social networking competitor Google revealed earlier this week that it will apply for some gTLDs.

Google confirms new gTLD bids

Google will apply for several new generic top-level domains, according to a report in AdAge.

The company will apply for some dot-brands, and possibly some keywords, the report indicated.

“We plan to apply for Google’s trademarked TLDs, as well as a handful of new ones,” the spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

AdAge speculates that .google and .youtube would be among the applications, which seems like a fair assumption.

The revelation comes despite the fact that Google engineers recently stated that there would be no guaranteed search engine optimization benefits from owning a gTLD.

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if keywords representing some of Google’s services, such as .search and .blog, are also among its targets.

The total cost to Google is likely to run into millions in ICANN application fees alone.

It will also be interesting to see which registry provider — if any — Google has selected to run its back-end.

Google is one of the few companies out there that could scratch-build its own registry infrastructure without breaking a sweat.

The AdAge report also quotes Facebook and Pepsi executives saying they will not apply.

No Google boost for new gTLDs

Companies hoping to reap search engine optimization benefits from applying for keyword gTLDs related to their industries are in for a rude awakening today.

Google engineer Matt Cutts said that it’s “just not true” that relevant gTLDs will automatically rank higher than their equivalent .com domains.

In a post on Google+, Cutts wrote:

Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.

The post was in response to an article by ARI Registry Services CEO Adrian Kinderis, in which he postulated that dot-brand and keyword gTLDs can help build credibility, leading to SEO benefits.

Kinderis wrote:

Ultimately, the big question is: will car.insurance rank higher than carinsurance.com (for example)? All the evidence suggest the answer is yes, provided that the .insurance namespace builds value and perhaps verification into its space to ensure it is a signpost for good, trusted and authoritative content.

In response to Cutts’ post, Kinderis said he’s sticking by his opinion.