The New .co Domain

A new doamain has become available and is causing a bit of a stir. What used to be the suffix for Colombia in South America is now being presented as a new domain for busines – .co – that’s it, not .co.uk but the simple .co

The reasoning behind this new domain seems to be that it represents smaller companies and businesses.
A number of companies have registered their names in the new domain – probably to protect it from being taken by a rival. And if you are a company owner you should consider the same. I say this reluctantly because in my jaded and synical mind this looks like a great way of generating billions of £ in revenue for the domain registration companies. I don’t recall anyone in any blog, chat room or twitter posting saying “What we need is a new domain suffix”.

For example, how may companies own the .ltd.uk, .biz, .eu or even the .uk.com versions of their domain? It may be that .co is directed more at the USA market where less domains seem to be available. Perhaps business finds .biz a bit too hip and not serious enough.

It remains to be seen if .co will gain any validity on search engine rankings, only time will tell, and at the moment this is not a way to boost your site in the rankings.
However According to surveys by .co Internet (www.cointernet.co – who also happen to be handling the .co roll out) 75% of people associate “co” with words like “company”, “commerce” and “corporation”.

So there is a chance that .co will take off. And at around £15 p.a. it may be worth buying up your domain in the .co version to cover yourself against competitors.

At the moment it may not be straightforward to do this. When I made enquiries I was shunted around a bit until I reached one of the ten UK providers. It’s still early days but if you contact your hosting or domain provider they should be able to help you. Alternatively you could go direct to one of the providers – www.cointernet.co/registrars/co-registrars