If you register a lot of domain names, you probably already have seen advertisements for the "us.com" top-level domain (otherwise called domain name extensions).

Technically, "us.com" is not a TLD. It's an actual domain name (like www.us.com). The company that owns this domain name is CentralNic. They also own others like "eu.com" and "uk.com".

Their business idea is that people who want a popular keyword in a domain name cannot get such domains because they are already taken. So, by offering this new quasi-TLD, people can get the domain they want: computers.us.com, or motorcycles.us.com, etc...


The question is if it's really worth our while to register such a domain name?

Technically, what you're registering is a subdomain. A subdomain is another website residing under a larger website. For example, under the Google.com website, there are several sub-websites below that such as news.google.com, labs.google.com, desktop.google.com, etc. These are all self-standing websites that fall under the larger google.com hierarchy.

So when you register something like "motorcycle.us.com", you're actually setting up a sub-website under the larger us.com website. The "us" is an actual domain name, much like "google" is a domain name on the .com TLD.

While each sub-website under us.com is a self-standing website, the search engine optimization (SEO) ramifications are still not well known. As it is, no one truly knows how Google handles subdomains differently than domains. What we do know is that Google treats subdomains as if they were separate from their parent site, as far as listings on the search results pages go. But we don't know if Google ranks these websites using their parent site's ranking, or if they force each subdomain to build up its own rank. Only the priviledged few at Google knows that answer.

Moreover, if the us.com domain name gets a penalty from Google, will that penalty trickle down to each subdomain?

That's a serious question to consider if you're planning to invest a lot of time and money into building a reputable website.

I'd avoid registering a name on us.com, and instead focus on registering a domain on an actual TLD (.com, .net, .org. .us, etc..). It might be harder to find the domain you want, or one that suits your requirements. But in the long run, you won't suffer (or benefit) from whatever happens to us.com.

Labels: Domain-Names