Matt Cutts: No, fresh TLDs will not automatically get a boost over .com in search results

Straight from the horse’s mouth: don’t expect an SEO benefit from your fresh TLD.

Yesterday Adrian Kinderis, CEO of fresh TLD registry services provider ARI Registry Services, published a piece saying that fresh top level domains will automatically be favored by Google over .com:

Will a fresh TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.

While many people scoffed at this, it was still open to debate.

But now Matt Cutts, Google’s search quality czar, just shot this down on Google+:

I read a post by someone offering fresh top-level domain (TLDs). They made this claim: “Will a fresh TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.”

Sorry, but that’s just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank fresh TLDs appropriately, but I don’t expect a fresh TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely fresh TLD for other reasons, that’s your choice, but you shouldn’t register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you’ll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.