Currently the internet is served by 21 gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains) including .com, .org and .net to name a few. But 2010 sees ICANN (the not-for-profit organisation tasked with coordinating the internet’s naming system) opening up the internet naming system further with the introduction of new TLDs. So in theory, soon you will be able to have .anythingyoulike.

The reason for making this change, as stated in a recent press release on ICANN’s website, is to promote and encourage innovation and offer people more choice. And it seems support online is growing for new TLDs with sites like www.supportnewtlds.com set up supporting ICANN’s 2010 plans.

I’m sure most people reading this have at some point in their lives spent countless hours trying to come up with a clever and easy to remember .com or .co.uk URL that reflects your business, blog or website, which hasn’t already been snapped up years ago.

.Com domain names often come at a premium and many of the more popular ones were registered many moons ago by some savvy individuals and they can exchange hands for colossal amounts of money. The world’s most expensive domain is reported to be Sex.com which allegedly sold for $14 million dollars in 2006. Business.com went for $7.5 million and Beer.com for $7.0 million, so domain names are certainly big business.

We were recently asked to provide expert SEO comment for a Future Laboratory report on this very issue. The report was entitled The Liberalisation of the Internet and was commissioned by Gandi.Net. The report looks at exploring how the internet will change as a result of plans for liberalisation, in the form of the introduction of new TLDs.

So what are the likely implications from an SEO standpoint of the impending influx of new TLDs and what role do keyword rich URLs currently play in Search Engine Rankings?

Well from a natural search (SEO) point of view, if a domain contains some of the keywords that you are targeting, this can give your site a small boost in positioning in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). However, buying keyword rich domains to achieve high volumes of traffic is by no means a solid SEO strategy and is unlikely to have a massive impact on SERPs when used in isolation.

Google determines how well a site will rank for a given search term largely on the volume of high quality links pointing to the domain, of course there are other factors involved in the algorithm, which is always changing, but it’s widely regarded that incoming links hold the most weight with Google. However with Yahoo and Bing we have seen the keyword rich domains ranking higher, which suggests they put more of a weighting on this factor. For example, if you search loans in Google.co.uk, then loans.co.uk or loans.org don’t feature until pages 3 and 4, however on Yahoo UK loans.co.uk is in the first few results and on Bing loans.org appears on page 1. But an SEO strategy focusing efforts solely on Yahoo and Bing is fundamentally flawed, when you consider their combined UK search market share is under 10%.

So exploring the associated SEO benefits of keyword rich TLDs further, consider the example of mp3.com. Using Yahoo’s link tool this domain has over 39 million links pointing to it. Let’s say a large popular online retailer wanting to take market share from mp3.com, registers the URL mp3.music. Will mp3.music outrank mp3.com in Google? It’s unlikely without a solid SEO strategy behind it, but mp3.music certainly stands a great chance if they get their SEO and Online PR strategy right. All this effort does come at a price however and whether its achievable or not remains to be seen. And it’s also worth noting that the URL mp3.com has a great head start as the URL is nearly 12 years old and has already built up trust (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TrustRank) with the search engines and a huge amount of inbound links.

What does the future hold for TLDs?

I think we’ll probably find an influx of new domains being registered once ICANN release the full list of TLDs (They are expected to start accepting applications for new TLDs at the beginning of 2010). Brands will be tempted to register variants and use these for marketing purposes and to protect their brand from Cybersquatting, while other individuals will clutter the internet with largely new domains possibly offering little or no value to the end user. But new entrants relying on keyword rich TLDs stand little chance of knocking well established brands out of the top Google rankings, without a concerted SEO effort and arguably an unlikely change to the Google algorithm, which reduces the impact of inbound links on search rankings.

For the foreseeable future, good content which encourages authoritative inbound links, will hold the most water with the Search Engines. But it will be interesting to follow the introduction of new TLDs from a user trust perspective as well. People are used to .com, .org and .net, so will the sight of a .anything domain make users wary to click? Will these new TLDs just appear spammy to the average internet user? I guess only time will tell what the true impact these fast approaching changes will have on the internet as we know it today.