2 million .fr TLD. Hurray! Seriously, that sucks for SEO…

On April 18th, AFNIC, the registry for .fr TLDs, has registered its 2 millionth .fr domain name (Well done manucure-saint-maur.fr!).

Everyone talk about it like it’s a good thing. Maybe it is. Maybe not.

My concern, from an SEO perspective, is that companies tend to buy domain names for every possible occasion and that is definitely a bad thing.
When advertisers launch a new campaign, a new product, an iPhone app or anything that could have its own web page, a large number of them tends to buy a new domain name (.fr, .com, doesn’t matter) and create a brand new website.
Most of the time, SEO is not considered relevant for the website since it’s a website that will either have a limited lifetime or is a full-flash presentation of the product that will never be able to compete for any keyword in search results.

Instead of seeing this type of website like a standalone thing, it should be considered as part of the entire SEO eco-system of the advertiser.
If the website was just part of the main website, accessible via a folder of the main TLD (a simple one of course), every link it would gain in news articles, blog posts, press releases, and so on would be adding value to the overall external linking factor, helping out the main website in SERPs.

I think it would be a good thing to reduce the number of TLDs instead of seeing the increase as a goog thing.
There are more than 85 million .com TLDs…
The multiplication of domain names polutes the web just like product packages polute the environment (ok, maybe that one is a little too hard but you get the idea ^^).

Source: silicon.fr

About the Author

Gaetan Bertin, Digital Media Strategist evolving in the web industry since 2000. Expert in Media, Search Marketing and Web Analytics