This week the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced an “historic” change in the strategy behind domain name registration. They’ve agreed to sell a variety of new generic top-level domains (gTLD) that will allow companies to buy their name or industry.   As an example, instead of www.vividascent.com we could buy pr.vividascent or integratedmarketing.vividascent.  Apple could buy ipad.apple or Allstate could buy insurance.allstate or allstate.insurance.  The potential combinations are numerous. 

ICANN is using dramatic language to introduce this change, perhaps to go along with the dramatic $185,000 price tag for each new domain.  Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN said “ICANN has opened the Internet’s naming system to unleash the global human imagination.  We hope this allows the domain name system to better serve all of mankind.”  Thank goodness for mankind they are releasing these new domains!  While new domains will provide a higher level of branding, the elephant in the room was not mentioned in the ICANN press release.  The elephant question is “what will the search engines do with these new domains compared to the existing .com, .org and other suffixes that are already well established online”?

So far Google is silent on the matter.  Well, sort of.

Here are a couple of scenarios that might happen, and how your business may be affected:

A)  The most likely scenario is that search engines will not reward these new domains with higher visibility in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for relevant keyword “organic search” and the well established sites will remain on top.  Of course if someone searches for the new domains directly they will find them, but otherwise it could be buried beyond visibility.  Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team recently indicated that Google will “dial down” the influence of keyword enriched domains (watch this video).  This suggests that a keyword-trained domain may not be rewarded with authority in Google’s future.

In scenario B)  the search engines might deliver these new domains at the top of organic search results for the keyword or category they mirror.  As an example, if a company buys homes.chicagorealestate, and someone searches for “chicago real estate”, the search engines may reward the exact-match domain as long as it’s a credible site with good content and traffic.  Another example might be rustoleum.paint, where the search engines reward the “paint” suffix above the brand’s domain, which is rustoleum.com.

Only time will tell what the exact impact will be, but I wouldn’t rush to buy your category or brand domain unless there is a solid, strategic, financial or competitive business reason to buy it.  This will not change the way sites appear organically in the near future and you don’t have to rush to make a decision.  But you should strategically evaluate the opportunity – assuming you’re large enough to pay the $185,000 fee – to make sure you don’t miss an opportunity that may only fully reveal itself in the years to come.

Ask your marketing or PR partner for their input and opinion.  We don’t believe this is a “mankind-changing” issue, but it is worthy of review and thoughtful consideration.  Good luck!