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The Importance And Rise In Value Of ccTlds – Geotargeting

Posted on February 22nd, 2010 by admin in Domain News | No Comments »

A lot of people do not realize this but for a while now Google has been taking into account a website’s domain extension and the brower’s location when displaying search results.

As a result of this, if you search for “sport” when accessing Google’s UK search page (Google.co.uk) you will get 10 UK based result on the first page as opposed to searching for “sport” on Google.com where you get results from various parts of the world. Similarly, you will get Geo-targeted search results when accessing Google from other countries via theirs localized Google search page (localization happens automatically via redirect from Google.com when accessing from a specific location).

This adjustment by Google has increased the value of ccTld domain names tenfold, as a keyword domain with a ccTld is now more valuable SEO-wise than the same keyword in the .com tld – for that geographic location.

For proof that what I said above is correct, try it yourself. Or, check out the following Google Webmaster Help thread that was replied to by JohnMu of Google:

Yes, we do try to find context from these two factors – however, if your site has a geographic TLD/ccTLD (like .co.nz) then we will not use the location of the server as well. Doing that would be a bit confusing, we can’t really “average” between New Zealand and the USA… At any rate, if you are using a ccTLD like .co.nz you really don’t have to worry about where you’re hosting your website, the ccTLD is generally a much stronger signal than the server’s location could ever be.

As some other people have pointed out, this is a recent development by Google. Google now understands that most ccTld registries allow only the residents of that specific country to register domain names in the specific tld, so they reflect search results based on this fact (as one of the key factors). There are certain exceptions, like the .TV extension (ccTld of Tuvalu) that is used by sites all over the world and has no precedence over .com, and the .ME which is a more recent addition to this group of global domains as far as Google is concerned.

All is not lost however if you run a localized website on a non localized gTld. For example, if you run a UK based website on a .NET, you can actually Geo-target your domain name via Google webmaster tools to tell Google to consider your results as belonging to that specific location.

To do this, access your Google webmaster tools, go to Site Configuration -> Settings and specify your site’s geographic location.

Makes you wonder how all those new tld’s will behave SEO-wise when considering all of the above, doesn’t it?

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