It is widely acknowledged that .COM is the most popular domain, with more than 150 million registered. In third place is .DE with more than 15 million registrations. Do you know which one is second? Maybe .ORG, .INFO or .NET? No, the second place is .TK, which has more than 25 million registrations.

What does this domain represent?

It is the national top-level domain representing the island of Tokelau.

We’re sure you’ve never heard of it, as it is one of the smallest islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, a territory of New Zealand, and home to only about 1,300 people.

You’re probably wondering how such a small and unknown domain can have so many registrations. The main reason is that it is free for all natural and legal persons to register.

Restrictions on registering the 2nd most registered domain

The .TK domain offers you two ways to register: free or paid. When registering for free, you will encounter many restrictions:

• You can only register a domain for a period of one month to one year,
• even if you register the domain, you will not be the owner; it will still be the registrar,
• you cannot transfer the domain,
• you can only renew a domain 15 days before it expires,
• you must have at least 25 unique visitors to your website every 90 days, otherwise the domain will be available on the market again.

If you choose the paid option, the above restrictions will not apply.

4 reasons why it is not a good idea to register a .TK domain

Compared to other domains, .TK is twice as vulnerable to online scams, precisely because it is so easy and free to register. This is because there are a lot of “phishing” and “spam” websites on this domain.

There are other important reasons why .TK is not a good choice:

1. SEO

Websites with a .TK domain never appear on the first pages of search engines due to the high number of malicious sites. Even if you have very high quality content on your site, you will not rank on the first page with a .TK domain.

2. ADVERTISING

One of the best tools for advertising online is Google AdWords. If you try to join with a .TK domain, you’re not going to do well. There is a good chance that Google will refuse you membership. If you do manage to join, you can expect very poor ad conversion and therefore less earnings if you build your ad campaigns through a .TK domain.

3. UNLABELLED EMAIL

Another worrying fact is that most spam comes via .TK domains. If you have an email account with a .TK domain, it is likely that most of your emails will end up in the spam folder of the recipients.

4. DOMAIN MANAGEMENT

This is actually the biggest problem you may encounter when registering a .TK domain. If your site is successful, the registrar may sell it. As mentioned above, with a free registration, the registrar is still the owner of the domain, which means that they can manage it as they wish. It may even happen that he will redirect a lot of advertisements to your site. You will lose most of your visitors, and all the hard work you have put into your web presence will be lost.

Choosing a free .TK domain can do you more harm than good, so we recommend registering one of the paid and verified domains. You can find more than 200 domains at neoserv.si/domains.