Summary:
Good news for organizations that fear that they will lose their established search engine rankings if they migrate from their existing address to .travel.
According to .travel Registrar, EnCirca, an examination of travel destinations that have migrated to .travel addresses indicate that most have achieved top Google search rankings: including
Canada.travel, Egypt.travel, Seychelles.travel, Slovakia.travel, VisitTopeka.travel and Utah.travel.
After studying over 26000 .travel domain names and analyzing search engine results, our initial findings indicate an overwhelmingly simple tactic that travel companies can use to maintain their existing search engine rankings when switching to a new domain extension.
.travel Study Findings:
October represents the two-year anniversary of the launch of the .travel domain name. The .travel registrar, EnCirca conducted a survey of who has migrated to the .travel domain name.
Very few companies have actually migrated to a .travel address. However, for the few that have, we discovered that their .travel address ranked at the very top of search engine rankings at Google.
This is good news for organizations that fear that they will lose their established search engine rankings if they migrate from their existing address to .travel.
After examining the first 100 search results in Google, EnCirca found that travel destinations represent the majority of the early adopters to .travel domain names, with about 10% of the world's top 500 destinations migrating to .travel addresses.
Many of these have already achieve the highest search engine ranking by appearing on the first page of Google results. These include:
How they did it:
The key seems to be in officially switching your current website to your .travel domain name (only your webmaster can do this), and then redirect your old website address to the .travel domain (using a 301 permanent redirect).
This essentially allows your current domain name and email address to continue to function normally, while ensuring that your .travel website gets picked up by search engines. You can continue to use your existing email addresses and existing collateral without disruption.
Methodology:
EnCirca reviewed what is called the "zone file" for .travel (from September, 2007). This contains a list of the active .travel registrations. The zone file contained 26,621 entries.
A small number of domains that are missing nameservers would not be included in this file, but this number would be negligible.
Of these, 80% of the domains were found to resolve to a working website. The remaining 20% did not resolve.
The study then narrowed its focus to a list of the world's top 500 travel destinations. The list included all country names as well as the top cities in the world for tourism. Each of these entries was tested to see if they could be found via the Google search engine within the first 100 hits.
Of these destinations, 10%, or 50 unique .travel addresses were found within the first 100 Google hits. The search was conducted by using pairs of keywords containing the travel destination and the word "travel". The first 100 search results were then examined to determine if they were .travel addresses.
One area for future study will be: How long does it take for a new .travel destination to rise to the top of Google? All new websites take time to appear in Google search results, due to the delays in updating Google's database and an algorithm that prefers legacy domain names. However, our research indicates that there are ways to simply transfer a website's existing search rankings to a new internet address with a minimal delay.
Migration in progress:
One recent .travel migration to watch is San Francisco, California, USA. San Francisco announced their migration on August 20 to sanfrancisco.travel. In our next report, we will report back on their progress.
Return to EnCirca's State of .travel main page.
