Should You Buy a .scot Domain Name?

Not a country, in fact, but a genericTLD

Should you buy a .scot domain name?  

This is a personal opinion but in most cases I am advising clients and others not to buy the .scot domain.  

Domain names are a typical modern day Internet product in that they can be made up out of nothing and then sold at great expense.

You could make domain names up all day . . . and in fact that is already happening and .scot is not even a country code domain, and resides in a delegated roll-out of 1300 'generic' Top-Level-Domains.

DON'T ALL RUSH AT ONCE

I am not going to completely throw out the idea of .scot.  If you like the sound of it then it is always going to be of value to you, but if you already have a working .org, .co.uk or .com address, then think hard about .scot, because the joke may be on you.

You might think that .scot will help your business, idea or blog, but this is not automatically the case.  It is extremely unlikely that if you are looking to feature in internet search engines that .scot will help you.

If .scot is the only web address you own then it may be worthwhile paying the extra money — although it is a lot extra.  To ask people for £30 a year when Top Level Domains can be purchased for a fraction of that, is robbery.  

If search engines were doing their job properly, then a search for ‘plumber’ or ‘publisher’ should return results geographically close to you.  

For this to happen the person searching needs to be logged into their browser, or have some kind of location service switched on — but even then .scot is only going to play a small part in returning your site in the results.  

Given that dotSCOT is not a country based domain then the search engines will have to rely on other much more complicated associations, if they are going to try and place you and your services as Scottish.