It’s been five months since I launched this blog and it is still nowhere to be found when you search for “ted murphy” on Google.com. Google’s algorithm gives so much weight to site age, back links and apparently domain extension that superior content and relevancy don’t seem to matter.

I have owned tedmurphy.org and tedmurphy.net for many years. While neither of them are regularly updated with original content anymore both of them outrank this site. My Vimeo, Twitter , LinkedIn and Facebook profiles also outrank Ted.me for my name. All of these social media profiles link back to this blog yet Google.com doesn’t seem to recognize it as an authority. Ted.me does not rank in the first 100 Google.com search results for “ted murphy”.

I started wondering if I was doing something wrong. Is this blog configured improperly in some way? Tedmurphy.org is a simple Tumblr blog, a platform that doesn’t have any of the SEO bells and whistles you can install with WordPress (I use the All in One SEO pack among others). I looked through Ted.me and didn’t see any glaring issues. The site is indexed just fine and I rank for terms I don’t care about.

The only thing I could come up with was my .me domain extension. I went to Google.me and sure enough ted.me is listed #5 (with tedmurphy.org outranking it).

Beware of .me Domains

I have to admit I had second thoughts about purchasing a .me domain. I was drawn to it because ted.me is so short and unique… it’s not often that you can grab a 5 letter domain. I knew international domains were penalized on Google.com but thought I could overcome it with good content that people linked to. It appears I may have been wrong.

Am I screwed? Will ted.me never reach the top of google.com for my name because of the .me extension? It sure looks like that may be the case. In my opinion Google hates .me domain extensions. While ted.me did show up on Google.me it was still outranked by my .net domain, which means even Google.me favors traditional U.S. domains like .com, .net and .org. Unless you want to rank for Google in Montenegro I would stay away from .me domains for now.

If any SEO experts can weigh in on their experience with .me domains I would greatly appreciate it.


Ted Murphy

Ted Murphy

Ted Murphy is an American entrepreneur. He is currently the Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of IZEA, a technology company that provides software for influencer marketing.

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