Google Buys G.co, Making The Extension More Credible

Around one year ago the .co extension made its debut. It’s the official country level domain of Colombia, but it’s managed as a business venture by a couple of American companies. Some people were optimistic and figured that the similarity to the .com would give this new extension a chance of becoming popular. Others (including yours truly) were skeptical and thought that investing in .co domains was a waste of money.

Well, it looks like the first camp was right, as the .com extension is becoming more and more popular lately. In fact today Google announced that it bought the g.co domain name, and it plan to make an official Google URL shortener out of it. Other tech giants had already done similar moves. Twitter, for instance, owns t.co, and Amazon owns a.co.

An interesting point about Google purchasing and using a .co domain is that it actually gives a lot of credibility to that extension. A big problem with extensions like .biz and .info is that fact that mostly spam websites use them, but if Google itself is using a .co domain then other websites doing the same will probably be treated with respect from big G, right?

I haven’t purchased any .co domains, and I don’t plan to do so now, but at this point I must admit that if you manage to find a good .co domain still available it might be worth the investment.

You could also bet on the rise of popularity of such domains and purchase existing .co domains (say for $100, $1000 or $5000) with the plan of flipping them a year or two down the road (this is a high risk strategy, though, so think twice before doing it).

Finally, if you plan to build an authority website, I would still recommend going with a .com.