The launch of new TLDs opened up a world of possibilities, giving companies and professionals far more options for their online presence. At the same time, many warned that these extensions also created an opening for bad actors to register domains closely resembling legitimate sites for spam or phishing.
According to data published by Blue Coat (PDF), those warnings were spot on. Some of the “neighborhoods” created by new domain extensions have become almost exclusively the territory of spammers, phishers, and malware distributors. The .review and .country extensions are the worst offenders: nearly 100% of sites using them appear to be engaged in shady practices.
But new domains aren’t the only ones affected. .gq domains, assigned to Equatorial Guinea, have nearly 97% of their sites classified as fraudulent.
Extensions like these are at serious risk of being labeled “bad neighborhoods” by search engines. Bad neighborhoods are clusters of sites or links classified as low-trust, typically because they’re used for illegal or deceptive activity. Sites caught in these bad neighborhoods face an uphill battle to rank in search results.
Here are the extensions to steer clear of:
| Extension | % of fraudulent sites |
|---|---|
| .review | 100% |
| .country | 99.97% |
| .kim | 99.74% |
| .cricket | 99.57% |
| .science | 99.35% |
| .work | 98.20% |
| .party | 98.07% |
| .gq | 97.68% |
| .link | 96.98% |
Despite these troubling figures, many new domain extensions have built a solid reputation and can even help with search rankings, since the extension is often treated as a keyword within the URL (e.g., boxing.club for the search “boxing club”).
