This was the question that the .cat Foundation posed to Human Level at the end of 2021. Although on its website they promoted the adoption of this domain extension by Catalan companies, arguing that it could provide an advantage in the positioning of their websites for searches in Catalan, this claim lacked a scientific basis and there was no study or analysis available to confirm or refute it. And this was exactly what they asked Human Level to do: design and execute an experiment that would provide empirical evidence for or against .
As an SEO, I felt the same way I did when my parents gave me a Quimicefa laboratory for Christmas. We would have a budget to create an aseptic environment where we could design and develop an SEO experiment to try to demonstrate a cause-effect relationship, not just a correlation, between the use of a .cat domain and better positioning in search engines. It was going to be complicated, but we were going to have a blast!
But let’s start at the beginning.
Top Level Domain called sponsored ( sTLD – sponsored Top Level Domain ) and, within these, domains oriented to a specific geographic area: geoTLD . This type of domain is promoted and managed by a sponsoring entity representing a specific community that shares certain ethnic, geographic, professional, technical or other interests proposed by agencies or private organizations that establish and enforce rules that restrict the eligibility of registrants to use this top-level domain.
Fig. 1. John Mueller points out in this video that there is no difference in how Google ranks sponsored or geographic domains.
How does Google treat sponsored domains (sTLDs)?
This is a question that has been answered on numerous Our phone how to number are collected by human being so we have 100 percent accuracy in database. We are looking to help your middle east mobile number list business at most of the height wherever we can give you an accurate full database. We update our database every week even. 2024 All my database are fresh & recently updatedWith our Databases you can forget about so many sorts of SCAM and SPAM! occasions by official Google spokespersons. In this video , John Mueller states that “ we treat all new top-level domains like any other generic top-level domain. There is no additional value in having keywords as a domain extension. There is no additional value in having city names or country names as a domain extension. We treat them like any other generic domain, essentially like leica.com. So if you find a domain name that works well for your website, that you want to keep for the long term, and it falls under one of these new extensions, definitely go for it. I think that is perfectly fine .”
So, at least from the point of view of official documentation from Google, the experiment should not be able to show any impact, positive or negative , on the positioning in Google of content in a .cat domain compared to that same content in a .com or .es domain, for example.
Reality, however, would end up proving the opposite, as we will soon see.
SEO Experiment Goals: What Did We Actually Want to Prove?
At first glance, the question posed by the Fundació .cat seemed clear enough. However, it was open to multiple interpretations. Do .cat domains influence positioning? And in which search scenarios?
For example: Thus, one of the first points to establish in the study would be to raise the tests from certain search scenarios that would establish these initial conditions and analyze the impact of each of them on the result.
Conditions: how to maintain the asepsis of the test
The most complicated challenge when proposing an SEO experiment that aims to demonstrate a relationship between a certain relevance factor and its influence on the position achieved lies in the difficulty of establishing and maintaining laboratory conditions that guarantee the asepsis of the tests , avoiding the influence of other factors that would contaminate the results and prevent demonstrating the conclusive existence of a cause-effect relationship .
Because of this difficulty, most SEO experiments try to identify not a cause-effect relationship, but a correlation . And this difference is fundamental:
In a cause-effect relationship , we try to conclude that when we perform a certain action, a certain effect always occurs that is directly related to the action performed. For example, whenever it rains, the street gets wet. The street is dry before it starts to rain and it gets wet because of the water that falls in the form of rain, and not the other way around.
So secondly, we had to design an aseptic SEO laboratory environment where we could isolate and/or neutralize as much as possible the impact on the results of other relevant factors that could affect the measurement of positions. For example…
User-related relevance factors
Certain user-related aspects affect the results each user gets when doing a search on Google. Among others, the following are important:
History of searches, navigation, clicks, etc. recorded by the browser from which the search is made or in our own Google user profile. All this activity is recorded in the My Activity section on Google, as well as in the form of cookies in our browser:
Fig. 2. The user’s search history is stored in their Google profile and may affect the personalization of their search results.
Language and region settings: configured in our Google preferences:
Fig. 3. Language and region preferences stored in users’ browsers affect search results.
Geolocation by IP: When we launch a search on Google, the search engine performs a geolocation that it uses to return local results, for example. We can check where it geolocates us in the footer:
Fig. 4. The geolocation of the search author, visible in the footer country email material of the results, also affects the ordering of the results.
All of these factors also affect the results presented by Google. If we wanted an aseptic environment, we had to be able to neutralize them so that they would not affect the positions obtained in the measurements.
On-page relevance factors
Comparing under the same conditions how a .com domain is positioned, for example, compared to a .cat domain also required neutralizing all on-page relevance factors that could affect the results.
Factors such as:
Quality, originality, authority and breadth of content.
Semantic factors.
Language coincidence: a website in the same language as the one selected as preferred by the user in their browser would favor better positioning.
Server geolocation: since its proximity to the origin of the search could influence the result.
CMS used: a different content manager can favour different america email list content/code ratios, different semantic markup…
Factors related to user experience (UX) and download speed (WPO): depending on the design, image optimization, prioritization in resource download, etc.
Off-page relevance factors
Finally, we also had to compare the off-page relevance factors of the domains being compared.
Factors such as:Proposed methodology
Domains
Given the above conditions, we decided that the test should be done on:
New domains , registered simultaneously, to equalize their seniority.
Domains without external links , to match their authority and popularity.
Domains without any semantic relevance start with their own domain name.
Domains whose content will use exactly the same server infrastructure , CMS and theme or template to match any aspect related to geolocation or server performance, download speed, etc.
A number of domains that would give us the possibility of having a sufficiently representative sample to support the validity of the results obtained.
