As a part of our generating the Globe Runner New gTLD SEO Power Ranking Index, where we gather a list of the websites that have actually been built on New gTLD domain names. Once we gather the URLs (this latest update has over 20,000 websites included in it), we look at lots of interesting data. One of the data points that I was very interested in looking at is the number of backlinks that these New gTLD domain names have. Keep in mind that we’re only really talking less than two years of availability, since around January 2014 when these started to get registered.

This time, I looked at the top fifty websites with the most backlinks to them. Interestingly enough, I found that there was a broad spectrum of backlinks and types of websites that were built. But only ONE website with over 1 million backlinks. There are a few others with a lot of backlinks, and I was amazed by the fact that there are so many insurance and .cheap domain names on the list. Here is the most interesting data points that I gathered from our list of the top 50 websites that have the most backlinks. All built on New gTLD Domains.

10 of the top 50 sites with the most backlinks are “pills” websites.

24 of the top 50 sites with the most backlinks are insurance websites.

Only 4 of the top 50 sites with the most backlinks are adult websites.

Only 1 websites of the top 50 sites with the most backlinks have over 1 million backlinks. 3 have 900,000 backlinks, one with 800k backlinks, one with 700k, 6 with 600k, and 9 with over 500,000 backlinks. The rest have over 200,000 backlinks.

27 of the top 50 sites with the most backlinks are hosted on .cheap domain names.

The top 50 New gTLDs for backlinks include:
.careers
.cheap
.center
.life
.wtf
.build
.buzz
.today
.bid
.estate
.nyc
.systems
.sexy
.foundation
.discount
.guru
.black

There is only one “backlinks” website on the list, in the business of building backlinks, and it has 600,000 backlinks.

The website that has over 1 million backlinks is an employment website.

Only one website of the top 50 sites with the most backlinks uses a subdomain other than the www subdomain.

Online 3 of the top 50 sites with the most backlinks use the www subdomain on their website. ALL the other 47 websites do not use a www in their main URL, they use the non-www version of their site. For example, they use keyword.gtld rather than www.keyword.gtld. I find this to be a very interesting trend amongst the New gTLD domain names.

The top site, with more than 1 million backlinks, has a “create date” of March 5, 2014. That means that they built over 1 million backlinks in 14 months. That’s 74,360 backlinks per month. Would you call that unnatural building of backlinks? Apparently it’s not a huge problem, because the site ranks #1 in Google for the keywords in their domain name (i.e., keyword1.keyword2).

Because of the nature of these sites (the topics of the top 50 websites built on New gTLD domain names with the most backlinks), we feel that we don’t want to reveal the actual URLs publicly but listing the full list in the post. If you are genuinely interested in the list, feel free to contact us and we’ll be happy to send you the list offline. However, here is the list of the top 20, in an image file:

We use the Majestic toolset to gather the link statistics, and we use a variety of Google search queries to gather our list of over 20,000 websites that have been developed on New gTLD domain names. Our process is proprietary to identifying the list of these websites, but generally the process involves starting with the list of New gTLD domain names, sorted by the most registrations. We then use Google search queries, over a period of a few weeks, to identify websites that have actually been developed on New gTLD domain names. No “parked”, redirected, or “low quality” content websites are included in our list. Once we gather the initial list, we use Majestic.com to gather link data and other data that Majestic’s variety of tools provides.

In an upcoming post, we’ll reveal the updated New gTLD SEO Power Rankings Index.