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Let's say for example you want to register domain name assembly.com or assembly.net and find out that they are already registered (not available).

Would you go with the domain name assemb.ly in such case? By having .ly the domain name represent word assembly but I think .ly domain is not so friendly for search engines?

What do you think?

Do you see any advantage of asemb.ly over assembly.com or assembly.net except it is shorter?

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    It makes it a bit more difficult to explain, but I always have a small spark of "ha, I like the creativity". You could easily make the .ly the main domain, and header-301 the .com version to it. Both work, both benefits.
    – Martijn
    Jun 12, 2014 at 10:43

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It totally depends on the requirements. The .ly domain name represent their business in Libya. If my targeted visitors OR business is relevant to Libya I will surely consider it. Else, look for an other alternative OR domain name.

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  • The business does not have anything in common with Ligya. The .ly represents the last two letters of the word assembly
    – user2926340
    Apr 13, 2014 at 5:41
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    @sreginogemoh You should perform some research if this domain is a global TLD or a regional domain that would automatically get geotargetted to its country. If latter is the case, I would not buy it as a lot of Search Engines will assume that your audience are in that specific country (libya in this case).
    – Anon
    Apr 13, 2014 at 5:58
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In general you'll find you probably need both - while assemb.ly might be slightly shorter, explaining to people that it's "assemb dot el why" will probably take longer than assembly.com.

Many of the brands that make use of this particular TLD do so as a URL shortening process, but they then tend to resolve on a more common TLD, for example the Bitly domain bit.ly redirects to bitly.com, similarly ow.ly for hootsuite.com and so on.

Note also that you may well fall under far more stringent content regulation if that is your primary domain - this article from 2010 talks about the case of a domain being seized by NIC.ly because

the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law

As has been noted, the .ly TLD is considered a "country code TLD" (it's not on Google's list of Geotargetable domains), and so will probably rank higher when searching from within Libya than for people outside of it. Your best hope is that you don't use a CDN, and host the servers in your local country so that Google can use the IP address to help localise you.

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  • It is not "considered" a country code, it is a country code, delegated as such by IANA to the corresponding local government, see iana.org/domains/root/db/ly.html which also means that any domain under .ly needs to abide by the registry rules, derived from the country laws. So care should be taken to analyze those laws and rules before registering the domain names. This is of course the same for any other TLD, and ones have to remind that .COM/.NET does depend on US laws.
    – Patrick Mevzek
    May 10, 2017 at 0:33

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