This surprising SEO experiment concludes that .cat domains rank better than .com or .es
Posted: Tue Jan 07, 2025 9:41 am
By Astrid Ruiz
Marketing4eCommerce Editor
Human Level , headed by Fernando Maciá , is a Valencian digital marketing consultancy that in 2021 was commissioned by Fundacio.cat to study whether having a .cat domain could help to better position the websites of Catalan companies in searches in Catalan. Until then, there was no study that confirmed or denied this claim, so the agency embarked on a curious SEO experiment to analyze it: is there any difference in the positioning of a .cat domain compared to a .com or .es?
How the experiment was created
Theoretically, according to John Mueller, senior search analyst at Google , there is no additional value in having city or country names as domain extensions . Therefore, the result of the experiment should ecuador number data be that .cat domains do not offer any advantage over other domains, such as .com or .es.
However, the results will leave you speechless.
Before starting any kind of evaluation, the agency understood that it was necessary to create an aseptic virtual environment that would allow the experiment to be carried out with guarantees: for this it was necessary to eliminate the influence of user relevance factors (search history, navigation, language and region settings and geolocation by IP), on-page relevance factors (quality, originality, authority and extension of the content, semantic factors, same language, server geolocation, CMS used and user experience factors and download speed) and off-page relevance factors (domain age, number and quality of links, thematic authority of the domain, popularity and social mentions) of the websites to be analyzed.
Marketing4eCommerce Editor
Human Level , headed by Fernando Maciá , is a Valencian digital marketing consultancy that in 2021 was commissioned by Fundacio.cat to study whether having a .cat domain could help to better position the websites of Catalan companies in searches in Catalan. Until then, there was no study that confirmed or denied this claim, so the agency embarked on a curious SEO experiment to analyze it: is there any difference in the positioning of a .cat domain compared to a .com or .es?
How the experiment was created
Theoretically, according to John Mueller, senior search analyst at Google , there is no additional value in having city or country names as domain extensions . Therefore, the result of the experiment should ecuador number data be that .cat domains do not offer any advantage over other domains, such as .com or .es.
However, the results will leave you speechless.
Before starting any kind of evaluation, the agency understood that it was necessary to create an aseptic virtual environment that would allow the experiment to be carried out with guarantees: for this it was necessary to eliminate the influence of user relevance factors (search history, navigation, language and region settings and geolocation by IP), on-page relevance factors (quality, originality, authority and extension of the content, semantic factors, same language, server geolocation, CMS used and user experience factors and download speed) and off-page relevance factors (domain age, number and quality of links, thematic authority of the domain, popularity and social mentions) of the websites to be analyzed.