We recently talked about a post Google’s Matt Cutts made to Google+ discussing how Google will handle the new TLDs. He referenced a blog post talking about how the new TLDs will be “automatically favoured by Google over a .com equivalent,” which Cutts said is “just not true.”
He has now put out a new video talking about how Google will treat the TLDs, in response to the user-submitted question:
How will Google treat the new nTLDs where any Top Level Domain is possible e.g. for corporations eg. www.portfolio.mycompanyname regarding influence on ranking and pagerank?
“Well we’ve had hundreds of different TLDs, and we do a pretty good job of ranking those,” says Cutts. “We want to return the best result, and if the best result is on one particular TLD, then it’s reasonable to expect that we’ll do the work in terms of writing the code and finding out how to crawl different domains, where we are able to return what we think is the best result according to our system.”
“So if you are making Transformers 9, and you want to buy the domain transformers9.movie or something like that, it’s reasonable to expect that Google will try to find those results, try to be able to crawl them well, and then try to return them to users.”
“Now there’s going to be a lot of migration, and so different search engines will have different answers, and I’m sure there will be a transition period where we have to learn or find out different ways of what the valid top level domains are, and then if there’s any way where we can find out what the domains on that top level domain are,” he says. “So we’ll have to explore that space a little bit, but it’s definitely the case that we’ve always wanted to return the best result we can to users, and so we try to figure that out, whether it’s on a .com, or a .de, or a dot whatever, and we’ll try to return that to users.”
Cutts also put out another new webmaster video talking about why you shouldn’t be obsessing over your link numbers.