Much chat over the weekend about Scotland and Wales getting their own domain names – .scot, .wales and .cymru. But what does this mean for Scottish/Welsh businesses and should English firms be rallying for a .england or .eng?

While there will be the usual rush and pressure on firms to go and buy either industry level domains like whisky.scot or company names like myfirm.scot thinking that they need to safeguard their name against squatters or get a competitive advantage on others.

The truth is it will gain them no benefit in the long run unless they actively do something useful with the website – and then it’s just another website. Even Google has pointed out that people grabbing new gTLDs for SEO benefit won’t see much, if any, of a boost.

Also, at the end of the day – and there are those who disagree – a .com is still the king. Yes, others sell well, but there’s still something incredibly authoritative looking about the .com in my opinion – as I said in Feb 2011.

If you’ve got the spare cash, sure throw it on some websites and new domains. But you could probably do more with that cash investing in what you already have, though some of the new URLs may be nice for stunts.

In closing, .scot and so on are nice ideas but no one should be panicking this morning about it.

UPDATE: To get the ball rolling on this will cost – before staffing, hardware, etc – just under £117,000. By the time you add in everything, you could be looking at costs of up to £500,000. Secondly – as a few people have asked – I’m very pro-independence and while it’s a nice idea, I really don’t see any benefits to this. Companies will still chase .com names, even in a standalone Scotland.