Google's John Mueller said in a Reddit thread that he would personally go with a traditional TLD (i.e., .com) even if it means having to put a hyphen in the domain name. This is instead of picking a TLD that may be considered lower quality or cheap.
The question was in response to a site owner saying he went with a .xyz TLD because his brand name on the .com was taken and didn't want to go with hyphens in his domain name. He also added that he saw Google went with abc.xyz for its investors and Alphabet holding site, so thought it would be good. Over time, he noticed that "instances where sites won't allow a .xyz URL to be posted because it's considered "spam" or folks consider it "AI," he wrote.
John wrote in part in his super-long response:
Personally, if I had to choose between a "traditional" TLD + a domain name with 1+ dashes, vs one of these often-problematic TLDs, I'd always go with the dashes (and better: pick a domain name for your brand that's not already taken by others, where you don't need "the-best-thingamabob" or typo domain names).
This is not new, as John wrote in his post, we covered Googlers saying before not to go with cheap TLDs. We've seen Google wipe out some TLDs in the past, completely. Google even has a whole podcast on TLDs.
Anyway, here is John's full response in that Reddit thread, just in case Reddit pulls it down:
This will be interesting to answer without links (given the filters in this subreddit, hah). In general, domain names on TLDs are similar. But, ... I'd avoid free / cheap / minimal-abuse-handling / mostly-spammy TLDs, since domains there can come with a significant burden to overcome before they've been recognized to be reasonable. If you're starting out with something that you want to use for the long run, it's worth making sure you're not trying to build a serious business in an "everything goes" neighborhood. This is not new at all, and there's no list from (afaik) any search engine, but there are some from services like Spamhaus or other security / spam organizations. Domain names on challenging TLDs might find that crawling & indexing is slower, even sitemaps may struggle to be considered worthwhile (you need to show that your site is not like the others in the neighborhood), emails & chat messages might get dropped, and that people will bulk-disavow or otherwise filter links from all domains on the TLD in an attempt to filter out spammy links. Personally, if I had to choose between a "traditional" TLD + a domain name with 1+ dashes, vs one of these often-problematic TLDs, I'd always go with the dashes (and better: pick a domain name for your brand that's not already taken by others, where you don't need "the-best-thingamabob" or typo domain names). The other thing I'd watch out for is that the domain name is actually on a TLD, and not a subdomain from someone else's domain name.Google for the pages below to read up more. Again, none of this is new.
* "Google: Don't Pick Cheap Domain On TLDs Overrun With Spam" (SERoundtable)
* "Google: Don’t Choose Cheap TLDs, Avoid Spam Risks" (Search Engine Journal)
* "Google Wipes Out Any Site On CO CC" (SERoundtable)
* "The Perils of an .xyz Domain" (Spot Virtual)
* "Phish-Friendly Domain Registry “.top” Put on Notice" (Krebs on Security)
* "Reputation Statistics registrars & charts" (Spamhaus; eg, the ccTLDs associated with phishing)
Again, none of this is new. None of this is limited to SEO. But if spending $2 more will let you avoid a long struggle, I'd recommend spending the $2 more (or whatever the price difference between a good TLD and an iffy one is. I realize price sensitvity differs across the world, but your time will be worth more than the few dollars it takes to use a good TLD.) Are more-expensive TLDs always better? No - a lot of the broad usage depends on how abuse is taken care of by the registrar, which takes time & work, and registrars need to calculate that in. What about really-expensive TLDs? I don't think you'd see any additional SEO value once you get past the "this TLD is generally ok" threshold.
Well, this got a bit longer than WebLinkr's technically-correct "it depends" :-). I hope it's useful and look at that, no links (I was going to set up a linktree with links, but thought that would be even weirder).
Forum discussion at Reddit.
Update: Just to be clear:
Hah :-)
I think what also got lost a bit is that I'm not saying .com/net-or-bust, but specifically talking about abuse handling & significant spam on some TLDs. There are tons of non-traditional & good TLDs.
— John Mueller (@johnmu.com) September 8, 2025 at 8:57 AM
