Actually .. there is some "anecdotal" evidence that a .org or .edu domain can help
with Google .. the brainiacs at Google are continually developing new and improved
algos to produce ever more relevant results for the searching public .. among the
web geeks (like me) who track this stuff, who live or die based on our ability to
deduce the factors used by Google (and inceasingly Yahoo, etc) to rank and serve
search results .. well, some theories have suggested that the TLD (.org VS .com) has
or had played a roll in determining the respectability .. or search-worthiness of a
website.

Emphasis on the anecdotal. Double emphasis on the only thing to count on is change
in the search engine algos.

And I concur with others who have stated .org domains are pretty much available to
anyone with the few dollars to invest in one. - Domains are dirt cheap now.

And .. while I'm at it .. a hint for generating more traffic to your website .. get
as many on-topic links from other sites as you can muster .. the current and
probably future strategy for Google (just to name one) is to look for how many
RELATED TOPIC websites link to you .. using RELATED WORDS as the link text

For example .. if you want to improve your museum's online traffic for "OurTown
events for kids" .. then weedle links from other sites that relate to "OurTown" ..
such as chamber of commerce, local hotels and travel sites, personal websites about
OurTown, etc .. and to enhance the effects for the events search I used as an
example .. some links from EVENTS related sites would be helpful indeed.

One of the additional benefits of this strategy is it helps build an insurance
policy against future seach algo changes .. if nothing else, you'll still get
traffic from the sites that link to you.

Search engines .. webmaster's best friend, worst enemy ;)


--
Roy Hemmat
Director, Discovery Media
** http://www.MuseumStuff.com
** 1000's of museums and educational links
** new serving millions of pages a month!


> I'm afraid your web person is talking utter nonsense. This is emphatically not the
> case, and would make no sense at all if it were.
>
> By the way, more hits than what, precisely?
>
> Best wishes
>
> Pete
> --
> Peter M Gray
> Museums Officer
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> I may be wrong, but our web person here tells us that search engines like Google,
> etc., look for dot-orgs over dot-coms.  He sez the fact that we are a dot-org
> accounts for more hits.
>
> Paul Eisloeffel
> Curator of Visual & Audio Collections
>
>
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