If there is one thing GoDaddy is very good at, it is upselling. For example, when you buy a dot com domain name, they would also sell you all its variants under the sun: dot org, dot net, dot info, dot biz, dot whatever.

I fell into this trap once. When I started to understand SEO, I concluded that all those purchases were not absolutely necessary.

What's your experience? Do you agree with my conclusion?

Of course they're not necessary for SEO. Use hostingdiscussion.com for example - addressing branding ... how many people do you think would use the extensions of .info or .tv or .org to find this forum? The first choice is always .com. I understand GoDaddy's upsell for what it is - marketing. I like having choices, so if .com is available, I always grab it first (and use a coupon if I can find one - which is always).

For SEO - having the ccTLD for your location *can* be a help.

However for Branding, owning multiple TLDs for your domain is advised - stops peopel passing off, trading on typos of the domain, similar business opening up etc.

For me, I always take the .com .net .co.uk if available

How does the .uk.com domain fair in England? Every now and then we see some users transferring to us with that extension, but the .co.uk seems to dominate. Have you noticed the .uk.com extension taking hold at all in your part of the world?

>How does the .uk.com domain fair in England

Why have a subdomain of uk.com when you can have a real domain of .co.uk is the general thought.

You have to market the .uk.com (or .gb.com) significantly harder, end-users get confused by it or go to the wrong site

*personally* I dont see the point, but as a registrar, we offer the CNIC domains because clients ask for them

>Have you noticed the .uk.com extension taking hold

I can't recall 1 website (outside of our own clients) that use a .uk.com 3LD - so no.

I completely agree with it

I think the main reason they try to sell you those variants are profit. It's not really a good business practice because they offer you something you don't need and make you believe that you need it.