Honest, this is not a bad .info scam site!

AP has a story on the most dangerous domian name suffixes to visit.

.info’s along with .hk and .cn are amoung the domain suffixes that are most likely to be "dangerous" according to McAfee. I personally was surprised by the .hk’s (Hong Kong) being known for being bad. I could have guessed about the .cn or China suffix.

One of the primary problems is with Websites selling pharmecutical products.

The report recommends avoiding buying pharmecuticals altogether from .cn domains. Many sites with these domains have multiple pop-ups. Another problem is fake forms used for harvesting information and email addresses.

The Associated Press: New report identifies dangerous Web domains McAfee found the most dangerous domains to navigate to are ".hk" (Hong Kong), ".cn" (China) and ".info" (information). Of all ".hk" sites McAfee tested, it flagged 19.2 percent as dangerous or potentially dangerous to visitors; it flagged 11.8 percent of ".cn" sites and 11.7 percent of ".info" sites that way. A little more than 5 percent of the sites under the ".com" domain — the world’s most popular — were identified as dangerous.

The best domains?

According to the report, .gov, .jp, and .au are some of the safest. .gov sites are government domains and therefore a bit harder for scammers to use. .jp are Japanese domains. I think I have seen a few spammy .au (Austrailian) sites although the report lists them as amoung the safest. Spam does not nessarily mean dangerous though.

Choosing a domain is an important part of building your site.

Much like building your business in a bad neighborhood, a domain suffix could be a problem. You don’t want your domain property in a bad neighborhood. I still recommend a .com domain if at all possible. While .com domain suffixes were not amoung the safest domains, they still have advantages. They were not the worst domains in the report either.

I think if I had gone with a .com domain suffix this site would be doing a bit better.

There is always the stigma of being a .info and being labelled spam.

I recently had to contact Akismet to get off the spam list.

This is the second time I have had this problem. Yet, I always try to leave comments that are relavant to the post. I think .info domains and email addresses have a default suspicion on them. I know my spam filters sometimes don’t like good comments from .info’s. I have even not been able to use a .info email in registering occasionally.

Do you ever suspect comments from a .info are spam on your blog before you read them?