Which fresh TLD is on top? Here’s one answer.

Search data shows that .directory is winning in terms of total indexed pages.

No, this article isn’t regarding whether .xyz or .club ought to be considered the most registered fresh domain name so far.

Instead, it’s a different look at how to measure the most successful fresh top level domain names.

Matt Bentley, who you may recall from back in the day at Sedo, now runs a search engine optimization service called CanIRank. He collated some data on how many unique URLs on these domain names are indexed in Google. Here’s a snapshot:

This chart represents total indexed pages, not unique domain names.

You might expect .directory to come out on top given that directory sites have, by definition, a lot of pages.

It also makes sense that .photos and .pics are ranked above .photography despite having a lot fewer registrations. Photos (pics) are more numerous that photographers; a photo site has a lot more pages than that of the typical photographer.

Some domain names are dominated by a handful of sites. Fotos.directory takes up basically positions 6-25 in the results for site:.directory.

Obviously, this way of measuring relative “success” is not perfect, but it’s one more way to rank domain name success so far.

This entire chart is a rounding error compared to some existing fresh TLDs, but it’s not fair to compare to domain names that have been out for a decade.

Perhaps more interesting was data Matt shared regarding how the indexed domain names are being used:

There’s a whole lot of forwarding going on.

35% of indexed URLs for fresh TLDs are forwarding to another site. (I noticed that a number of .link domains are being used for URL shorteners and these are getting indexed.) 60% are resolving to the matching website.

So who’s #1? .Directory, by at least one measure.