I wrote previously about using aged and trusted .ie domains to bolsteryour search engine rankings. Well now comes further confirmation of the value of the .ie ccTLD.

According to McAfee’s Site Advisor Mapping the Mal Web Ireland’s .ie ccTLD is second only to Finland’s .fi in terms of online safety risks:

Four of the five least risky country TLDs are Nordic countries: Finland (0.10%), Norway (0.16%), Sweden (0.21%) and Iceland (0.19%).Ireland (0.11%) rounds out the top five least risky country TLDs. This could be due to governing bodies employing stricter regulations of these domains.

I would imagine that the last comment is very much the reason for the low risk of .ie ccTLD.

• Seven TLDs (.com, .info, .net, .biz, Tuvalu (.tv), Cocos Islands (.cc), and China (.cn)) earn the dubious distinction of ranking in the top 20 riskiest for each of the four risky facets we examined.
• Of these seven domains, .biz and .info are the overall worst domains with highly risky rankings in each of the four categories:

  .info ranks 2nd (overall risk), 1st (e-mail practices), 10th (download risk) and 12th (exploit risk)
  .biz ranks 6th (overall risk), 6th (e-mail practices), 2nd (download risk) and 5th (exploit risk)

• Again, low cost appears to be at least one factor in drawing scammers to the .info TLD.
• Spammers flock to .info, which was created as an alternative to the crowded .com, because its domain names are cheaper – registrars often let people use them gratis for the first year – which is helpful for those, like sploggers, who buy Internet addresses in bulk. Splogs so commonly have .info addresses that many experts simply assume all blogs from that domain are fake.
• Others note that “.info is the first and only top-level domain that was explicitly created and chartered for unrestricted use, though various other TLDs have ended up that way as a de facto situation.”
• .biz is said to be the most popular TLD for spammers because the name servers update immediately, meaning spammers can start using the domain as soon as they register, rather than wait up to 24 hours for the registration to take effect. This is particularly attractive due to the transient nature of spam and phishing Web sites.

Nice to see that .ie ccTLD is so trustworthy.