If you are a member of a Webmaster’s forum, then chances are you have come across a thread titled “Are dot info domains bad for SEO?”, “Is there a penalty for using dot info domains?” or some thing similar.

There are quite a few people who believe, dot info domains rank poorly in search engines and are being labeled as spam domains by search engines and Google in particular.

While it is true that spammers and scrappers love dot info domains, because they cost next to nothing for the first year’s registration. There are people like me, who use dot info domains for legitimate purposes, and at least for now there is no data to suggest that Google or for that matter, any other search engine is discounting the value of dot info domains.

In fact as I will show you next, dot info domains are ranking as well and in some cases, better than dot com domains.

Case Study 1: PRChecker.info

Go to Google and enter the following phrase, “check pagerank” or “check page rank”. The first result for this phrase is, PRChecker.info, even though there are tons of dot coms out there competing for the same phrase!

If there was a penalty being levied on dot info TLD, then how would a dot info domain rank as number one for a phrase which returns 4,080,000 results?

Case Study 2: ContentPays.info

In the case of PRChecker.info, it might have been the case that since it is a PR 7 domain, it got through Google’s spam filters.

So lets talk about ContentPays.info, this domain does not have a tool bar PR yet. I have not bought any links, I haven’t spent a single dime on promoting it and I am not really an SEO Guru.

So can ContentPays.info compete with dot com domains and even manage to come on top?

Yes!

In fact this is exactly what happened on the 11th of July, on the 10th of July at 10:17 pm (GMT) I posted the review of knowpratibhapatil.com and with in couple of hours of the article being posted, the review was crawled by Google and added to their search engine listings as the number 1 result for the key phrase, KnowPratibhaPatil.

Here is a screen shot taken at that time:

Now you might say, what is the big deal, it’s not like that term has millions of results.

Well the interesting part is, ContentPays.info ranked higher than Indian Express and NDTV.com, which are both popular news sites in India and have a home page PR of 7 and 6 respectively. In fact NDTV.com is listed by Google as an Authority Site!

Then how did a four month old dot info blog with no PR manage to outwit big news agencies?

Now I am going to use a word that you have heard ever so often and have probably grown tired of, yes the dreaded seven letter word, “CONTENT”!

Yes that’s right, content.

If you combine the articles that were posted in the Indian Express and NDTV dot coms, they would roughly equal the size of the article that was posted on Content Pays. And since Google loves unique content, ContentPays.info managed to come on top!

End results?

Not bad for some thing I wrote in 20 minutes and figured only a handful would want to read. Add to that I am still number two in the search result, so there is still some traffic coming this way!

So all those who believed, dot info domains are bad for SEO; now you know the truth…