Japanese SEO,

.jp domain
Is a .jp domain better than .com or .net if your site targets Japanese people? I have had doubts about this and finally have come across some information that I think is reliable.

An organization called Seomoz conducted a survey of 37 SEO experts in the U.S. about Google’s ranking factors.  The results, published in April 2008, can be found at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

One of the factors surveyed is the TLD Extension of the site name  (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc.)  TLD stands for top level domain. You can read the U.S. experts’ comments at  http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#cat3 .  Note that the factor discussed here is not just country-specific TLD extensions such as .ca or .jp. but also different generic or global TLD extensions such as com,  edu, gov, net and info.

To follow up on this in Japan, where Yahoo is the number one search engine, a company called Impress R&D did a similar survey in January 2008. It polled the opinions of 22 SEO top experts in Japan about Yahoo! Japan.  Yahoo! Japan has its own algorithm that  differs from that of Yahoo in the U.S.  The results of this survey, along with the original U.S. one, are published on the web at http://web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp/l/2463 - in Japanese.  In short, these SEO professionals haven’t found much to talk about the issue of country specific vs. generic extensions.  That, to me, is an indication that having a .jp domain does not give a noticeable advantage in SEO ranking for your site.

It appears that the SEO professionals, both American and Japanese, tend to agree that .gov and .edu are given some weight by the search engines.  They also seem to agree that the TLD extension by itself is not a big factor except in the case of .gov and .edu,

There is only one comment made by a Japanese SEO expert about country-specific extensions.  It concerns Yahoo! Japan. The comment is, “If a site is providing services in Japan and has another country’s extension, (such as .ca, .kr, .uk) it would receive a lower ranking.”  That seems to be logical.  No one has commented in regards to whether a country specific extension such as .jp is better than a generic TLD such as  .com and .net.

Finally…

This is my very first post to this nak blog, so Hello World! It’s made with WordPress 2.2. It was pretty easy to set it up. I tried Movable Type first and I am glad I switched. Trying to customize MT was not easy at all to me. Plus, I don’t like that you have to keep rebuilding the entire site every time you write or make any changes. Not being free for business use is another thing.

I selected a pre-made theme called “organic” and customized it a little - changing colors and the top image - just from the style sheet and replacing an image file. I didn’t want to touch the PHP structure files. And that is all I needed to do to get started! If you are wondering which is better between Movable Type and WordPress, I say WordPress.