Branching out from .com... good idea?

[HCGDiet]

Lets say I want to branch out from the normal ".com" genre,  can you Rank a ".ly" in google search results?

[john4math]

Of course you can.  Any domain suffix can rank (unless excluded from Google altogether). Overall, .com's tend to rank the best. Take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics.

If you can get an exact keyword match for a suffix like .ly, it might be worthwhile over getting a .com domain that doesn't match as well.

[RyanKent]

To be clear, .co.cc is a domain. The suffix is actually .cc which is not banned from Google. I am not aware of Google ever banning a domain suffix.

For example, http://www.arduino.cc/ is a valid domain which is listed in Google.

co.cc is a domain in exactly the same way that seomoz.org is a domain. If seomoz.org was banned from google, all the rest of the .org sites would remain indexed with Google. The same idea applies to co.cc

It seems there is confusion where some people are viewing .co.cc as a TLD similar to .com or .net.

[john4math]

Oh wow, I had totally misinterpreted that article.  Thanks for clarifying!