Are domains with gTLD's (.ninja, .guru, .museum, etc..) bad for SEO?

Question

Would using one of the newer gTLD's have any adverse effect on SEO?

Answer 1

Good or bad are relative terms. Will the new gTLDs prevent your website from being indexed or crawled by search engines? Of course not.

Would it help or hurt you competitively? Depends what you are competing for.

If you are doing geographic specific services, then yes they are less effective that cTLDs.

But search engines are private companies and the owners are TLDs are private individuals, so the value ultimately comes from the market.

.io domains are good for tech because it's convention. .biz is considered less that .com because one is considered the prime TLD target for a company name.

Without years of testing, observation and analysis you cannot possibly speculate on whether or not they will provide any extra value than any other TLD.

Answer 2

I don't think they will have an adverse effect on seo but don't expect them to have an advantage either. Big G mostly cares about the content quality, speed and that kind of stuff. Sometimes ccTLDs may have an advantage over gTLDs when a local search is performed but these are not ccTLDs, these are gTLS.

Check this out: https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/4VaWg4TMM5F

You can also check out my post on new gTLDs: http://big.info/2015/02/disadvantages-new-gtlds.html

Cheers