Two days ago a new player well and truly entered the domain industry, off of the back of a successful test launch back in June open to select invitees only Google has now officially opened up their domain service to everyone. As you would expect with all things Google the website and user interface is clean, simple and a breeze to use, nothing fancy just smart intelligent use of the data and process’s.

But what is it you will actually be getting with Google Domains? Well for a start registration and re registration for most non premium .com domains starts at a reasonable and competitive $12 per year, and for some of the new TLD’s such as .coffee you will expect to see charges at around the $30 mark.

Once you have registered your domain with Google you will enjoy the services of the Google DNS Servers which quickly connect to your site and get it up and running, you will have free WHOIS registration and website forwarding and linking email alias’s to existing accounts. During the whole process Google is also offering free phone and email support.

Seamless integration with third party website builders like Square Space, Wix and Shopify will also be on offer, though charges for these services will be separate you will be able to peruse the templates on the Google Domains website to your hearts content.

Last but not least as expected but a neat nice to have and a key differentiator between this service and its competitors like Godaddy Google Domains will offer full support for site integration into blogger.com another venture owned by Google.

So all of the above sounds great but what does it actually mean, well competition is good and when a player like Google enters the marketplace it will most likely encourage some of the other Registrars to “up their game”, certainly expect to see a reduction in the re registration costs that people are being charged across the board especially for low value domains. Additionally with Google being such a big household name that is now selling over 30 of the new TLD’s we may see a notable pick up of their popularity with such a big name behind them.

One key area to watch for all those SEO fans out there is whether domains registered through Google perform better and establish a higher SERP quicker than non google domains.. Since Google have stated time and time again it is important to establish the history and source of a domain before buying as bad links can be so damaging to your domain’s ranking can we assume domains registered through Google will be assessed by the search engine giant at the point of registration? And on another random but somewhat connected thought – what has happened to PageRank???

For a full list of the new TLD’s Google has to go to list, and last but not least please don’t forget to check out the thousands of expired domains we have expired domains.