Gallery-Domains and Art-Domains are an option for the websites of Museums of Fine Arts or for museums with a fine arts collection. A museum could have its own address at .com or .org, but could present at the web the fine arts collection at .gallery. Sometimes museums could not register a short name at .com or .org, as these short names had been taken. The Gallery-Domains and Art-Domains offer a second chance. Short, memorable domain names are essential for the marketing of websites and their content. The .gallery domain names are cheaper than museum-domains, and they are unrestricted. Museums, which have not a non-profit status, are e.g. not eligible for Museum-Domains.
The new Gallery-Domains and Art-Domains will be new, additional networks which museums can use to fish for additional visitors. The relationship between a better ranking in search engines and the Berlin-Domains has already been proven by a Study of Searchmetrics. Websites with Berlin-Domains often rank better in regional Google search queries than websites with .de domains and .com domains. The result of the Searchmetrics study can be summarized as follows: "In 42% of search queries, .berlin domains have ranked better on a local level." Another study by Total Websites in Houston shows that the results of the Searchmetrics study are practically transferable to all new top-level domains, which means also to the new Gallery-Domains and Art-Domains. Total Websites states that Google considers the domain extensions of the new Top-level domains as an important criterion for the evaluation of a domain and therefore concludes that: "It is clear that the new top-level domains improve the ranking in search engines." Hans-Peter Oswald http://www.domainregistry.de/gallery-domain.html http://www.domainregistry.de/art-domain.html http://www.domainregistry.de/museum-domain.html _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l@mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l The MCN-L archives can be found at: http://www.mail-archive.com/mcn-l@mcn.edu/
