I was sent a marketing email today informing me that our registrar is now offering .co domain name. New domain name extensions often lead to rush buying of trademark and legally protected domains, however , the .co domain name, which is supposed to refer to Colombian websites is an interesting addtion. Most of the websites that I've seen offering .co domain names give misleading information about what .co stands for. For example, Network Solutions suggest that .co extensions stand for 'corporation', 'company' or even 'commerce' - completely misleading information. Others like 101Domains are a bit more honest. So why is it that people would want a Colombian domain name extension?

Perhaps the most attractive reason why .co will become popular is because its very easy to mistype a .com or .co.uk url and just put .co at the end. I've done it myself many times. So if you register www.google.co - you are going to get a shedload of traffic for very little effort ( in the short space of time before you get a friendly letter from the Google Legal Team which has over 100 lawyers on it's payroll).

Another reason is that the non techy public are unaware of what most TLDs stand for. They can probably tell you that .com means 'company' or something similar and that .co.uk might mean UK Company, but few will be able to guess what .co stands for. Therefore, there is likely to be a goldrush for the choice domain names by speculators who hope to buy domain names cheap, then sell them later for vastly inflated prices.

Having domain names linked to industry and region is always a good idea. If you have a .co domain name, its unlikely you will turn up in the local search results for anywhere else. Moreover, some search engines penalise listing from certain domain names for having a higher than average chance of being spammy or malicious. .ru and .ch are two notable example. These domain names rarely appear in my search results, even if they are in English. There is even positive prejudice for some types of extension: .ac.uk domains have much better SEO weighting than .co.uk domain. This is because JANET, the company responsible for handing out .ac.uk domain names have quite a strict policy and it takes a lot of effort and paperwork to get a .ac.uk domain name. I've only ever registered 3 .ac.uk domain names, but the rankings for these domain names are generally pretty good.