Let’s say you’re at a car dealership. You’re talking to the salesman and he tells you this shiny 2012 blue car runs great and you’ll love it. So you purchase the car and feel like the salesman was a sucker for giving the car away at such a low price. Then you wake up the next morning and the car won’t start. You bring in a mechanic who looks at the car and says, yeah, this car is junk, I can’t believe you were able to drive it home. It’s worthless. In my humble opinion, this is exactly what GoDaddy does to small business owners.

Last week while watching the Super Bowl, I saw a GoDaddy commercial advertising .co domain names and you needed to get one for your business ASAP! Those .co website addresses “get you noticed” and “smart businesses go with .co’s with GoDaddy”. And I can just imagine countless small business owners watching the commercial figuring if they buy a .co domain, their website will get more exposure, which will produce more sales leads and more revenue.

GoDaddy is peddling junk. Buying a .co domain name for your business won’t do anything. If Google or Bing decided to make a change in their search engine’s algorithm by giving websites with brand new domain extensions special ranking privileges, that’d be one thing. But that premise goes against everything Google stands for when deciding their organic rankings.

So will the .co domain name “get you noticed’? No. No it won’t. It won’t do anything. Buying the .co will not result in a single extra phone call, much less a new customer. The only value that domain offers is a piece of real estate on the internet. That’s pretty much worthless. Because .com, .net, and .org have been established as the premiere domain extensions on the internet and that fact has as much chance of changing as some new search engine knocking Google off it’s perch.

GoDaddy is making the internet marketing industry look bad. How would you like it if you bought a used car and it doesn’t do what’s advertised. That’s exactly what GoDaddy is doing here. And it’s because of companies like GoDaddy, that small business owners are still wary about spending more marketing dollars on the internet. Because there are still too many thieves that take advantage of people’s lack of knowledge in our industry.