Does a country domain help rankings??

[torfig]

Hi everybody,

Does anybody know the answer to this.
If I was going to make a site about Iceland and I would buy an .is domain instead of .com domain, would that get me higher rankings in the search engines if people where looking for a site about Iceland??

Would it maybe help me more to have an .info domain??


Thanks,

[robwatts]

Some search engines do give a marginal boost to country specific tld's( top level domains) in their regional serps.

A dot com tld whilst actually a tld for the USA is widely used and recognised as an international entity and will generally do well in most well trafficked SE's. An example of how this can work can be seen at google.

The following example demonstrates the effectiveness of a local tld over a com relative to the query hotels in italy.

http://www.google.it/search?q=hotels+in+italy

http://www.google.com/search?q=hotels+in+italy

In the first example the serps display local domains (.it) that are not present for a similar search done at the google.com address.

Whereas the same search done at the .com actually drops some of those more localised domains.

Ill leave you to draw your own conclusions :)

Bear in mind that my own geo location (europe) may well have informed the resuts of those two particualr searches. The use of an anonmysider would be a way of determining this further.

Id say that if you are targetting a localised market then its best to concentrate your efforts on the local tld specific to that region.

No one can predict entirely how SE's are going to change or rank sites in the future. Lots of people are of the opinion that so called 'local search' is going to become increasingly more apparent. Whilst this will be primarily driven by the geographic location of the users IP address in relation to the se query and the information contained within the website content, eg address or postcode for example, it would also make sense to use as an extra criteria the tld and location of the web server that hosts the returned site in any given serp.


<Edit> edited for clarity</edit>

[torfig]

Thanks for that robwatts,

I think I will get a .com domain after all because I am looking for visitors from outside Iceland.

Do you know if sites with a .info domain get higher ranking than .com domain???

I read this somewhere but I don't know if it is right.

Thanks,

[loki]

Originally posted by torfig


I think I will get a .com domain after all because I am looking for visitors from outside Iceland.



hold on, i believe you're missing the point.

in the case of a .co.uk domain, (or a site hosted on a server that is physically in the uk), you will show up in the normal search in gg, as well as when a searcher uses the 'uk sites only' option, whereas a .com would be filtered in the 'uk sites only' option search.

whether this will apply to google.es and others is yet to be seen buy i feel it's a decent feature and expect to see more of it.

makemetop wrote more about this around 6 months ago.

[torfig]

Aha,

So it would actually be a good thing to use a .is domain.

Thanks for pointing that out.

[Oxford]

I have question re the use of "regional" domains.

I understand that if I have a .co.uk site then, when a search is carried out using a filter such as "UK sites only" on Google.co.uk, I should get a listing for my target search terms (assuming it is well optimised!)

But what if my site is a .com and I also have the same domain registered as a .co.uk with a re-direct to the .com. Will the site appear in the .co.uk only listings in this instance?

Thanks

[loki]

if the .co.uk site is only used via a redirect, ie NOT promoted, then i would think that only your .com is in the SE's databases. so no, your site would not show up when searched for with the filter applied.

you cannot promote the .co.uk site, but a simple workaround would be to place the .com site on a server with a UK-based IP address, as the filter includes .co.uk domains AND sites hosted in the UK.

craig

[Oxford]

Hi Craig

Thanks for the response - this answers my question. It also explains why, when on Google.com with a .com filter selected, I didn't see our site which is .co.uk hosted in the UK with a .com re-direct.

Andy

[loki]

"when on Google.com with a .com filter selected"

there is no .com 'filter', only a non-UK sites filter.

i think the reason you're not seeing your site (without the non-UK filter) is that there is much more competition.

[Oxford]

>>there is no .com 'filter', only a non-UK sites filter.>>

Hi Craig

FYI, you can filter on .com (or any other domain) on Google.com by doing an advanced search and setting "domain" to ".com".

I used our company/domain name as the search term: "Blue Snapper", for a very narrow search which generates a "blue snapper" site:.com" search. The only listings we get are on .com directory sites that list our company and not for www.bluesnapper.co.uk itself (which is pointed to by www.bluesnapper.com) - this confirms what you have already stated in this thread

Andy

[loki]

you're right. i was referring to a simple search.