We are in the process of building our startup for QR codes at QR.io. Being an SEO/SEM guy for years, I was worried about Google snubbing a .io domain in SERPs.

We are in the process of building our startup for QR codes at QR.io. Being an SEO/SEM guy for years, I was worried about Google snubbing a .io domain in SERPs. In the two weeks that the new site has been online, we've floated up from page 50+ to about page 5 for our most-targeted keyword phrase (QR code platform). You do lose the ability to tell Google that it a US-targeted domain in Google Webmaster Tools like you can for non-country TLDs. We went with it because data payloads of QR codes can be quite small (especially in MicroQR codes) and every character saved is potentially an exponential gain where it comes to unique identifiers in a URL shortener.