Is there a correlation between ranking and different TLD
-
I've been thinking about buying some domains recently with some different extensions. In particular domains with country specific TLD's such as .in and .be etc.. But my question is has anyone had experience ranking domains like these in the UK market.
Is there a correlation between ranking and a country specific domain to rank in the UK market? I know I can target these domains at the UK market in GWMT, but is there a negative factor in trying to rank say a .in the UK?
-
Ah, I see where you are coming from.
There is room to manoeuvre with multi-national domains (.net etc), however it's when you go into specific country TLD's that you will struggle to pull UK rank.
I guess it depends how big a part of your marketing plan SEO is. Like I mentioned, it's certainly possible to rank one of these domains, but it is a uphill battle and if you're relying on SEO for income then I'd recommend against.
From a branding perspective, I can see the potential benefit of one of these domains.
Thanks,
David
-
Thanks for the reply. I understand business implications and why it's not a good strategy as have been there many times.
The reason I ask is for gimmicky brand domain names that use the .in, .im extensions etc.. and even .net in that sense as well. I've always stuck with .com/.co.uk but have seen some good domains that could be used with other extensions.
-
Hi Malcolm,
It's not impossible to get a non-UK TLD ranking in the UK results, but it is difficult and I'm yet to see a case where it makes sense for a Webmaster to use an international TLD to target the UK SERP's.
The whole purpose of an international TLD is to deliver a website intended for a specific region, therefore it wouldn't make sense for Google to fill the UK results with sites that are intended for other countries.
The odd ones do make their way in there, but it wouldn't be an advisable business model.
What would be your reason behind wanting to use an internation domain to target the UK?
Thanks
David
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How do hreflang attributes affect ranking?
We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate? How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?
International SEO | | Substance-create0 -
Help! A never before asked query about using a ccTLD but hosting in a different country
Hi Guys, I've a website that has a India specific domain ending with .org.in. The website has ALL the traffic from India (as mentioned earlier, it's a website meant only for audience from India). Currently this _.org.in_domainis hosted on a server located in India. I'm thinking of hosting this website in Singapore. Do you think that will negatively affect the current rankings of the website (i.e. changing the server location of my website from India to Singapore)?
International SEO | | seotoseo0 -
Delivering different content according to country
Hey, I have a question regarding different content according to country (IP)-
International SEO | | Kung_fu_Panda
We planing to serve mobile users using dynamic HTML serving (on the same url)
Is it possible to serve different content for different devices + different IPs (for example different content for a user from US android and someone from UK android ) thanks!0 -
Ranking in Different Countries - Ecommerce site
My client has a .com ecommere site with UK-based serves and he wants to target two other countries (both English speaking). By the looks of it, he wouldn't want to create separate local TLDs targeting each country, I therefore wanted to suggest adding subdomains / subfolders geo-targeted to each country that they want to target, however, I'm worried that this will cause duplicate content issues... What do you think would be the best solution? Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
International SEO | | ramarketing0 -
How do I get a UK website to rank in Dubai?
We are trying to get a UK-based children's furniture website to rank in Dubai. We have had a couple of orders from wealthy expats in Dubai and it seems to be the correct target market. Does anyone have any specific knowledge of this area? We are promoting the same website as for the UK market. Also does anyone know any user behaviour stats on expatriates using search engines? Do they carry on using the version of Google they are used to, or do most change to the local version of Google? Thanks in advance
International SEO | | Wagada0 -
Keyphrase ranking a geo-redirected site in Google
Hi all This is the situation. I have a client who runs a number of ccTLD sites (all exact match brand name domains), including a .com which they use for the US. This is a hair care product and due to Advertising Standards Authority (UK) restrictions, they cannot use a certain phrase to promote their products - 'hair loss' on the domain.co.uk site. However, in the US, there is no such restriction and can use wording this on the site. A brand name search in google.co.uk brings up .co.uk as 1st result and .com as 2nd result, so the .com is indexed in google.co.uk. Any non-US user visiting domain.com will be redirected to their ccTLD site. Here's my question - could I feasibly get the domain.com site ranking in google.co.uk for certain 'hair loss' based keyphrases, considering the fact that I can mention it in the copy on there but not on the domain.co.uk site. Would I need to remove any Geographic Target in the WMT account for domain.com? Or is this a form of Google cloaking and could see the site penalised? Thanks
International SEO | | Coolpink0 -
Sudden drop in rankings after 301 redirect
We recently merged our old webshops to one big webshop. The new webshop is mutlidomain/multilanguage so the English version is at the .com extension and the germand version at the .de extension etc. etc. We redirected the 2 best old webshops to the .com extention with a htaccess 301 redirect. The other old webshops we divided over the other extensions. We redirected the 200 most importent pages with a page to page redirect and redirected the other indexed pages to the new index page. (300K) Everything went well and the new website started indexing. All extentions are doing well and even the .com version had very good rankings for a few days. After a few days we almost lost all rankings to the .com version. We did always clean seo, had 100% unique content written by our own writers and translated by our own translators. Our old webshops have very good branche related backlinks and i can`t find anything else then the 300K redirects to the homepage that might be the problem. Hope somebody will help us, or know someone we can hire to check our webmaster account, and check everything we did.
International SEO | | snorkel0 -
Ranking local content against English content
Hi SEOMoz, If I have a site that has multiple language selection, how would it be possible for my site with localized content to rank higher than the default/English content? For example, in Google.co.th, my site with English content (http://www.xyz.com/en-us/) ranks higher than the localized content (http://www.xyz.com/th-th/). How is it possible for me to turn things around and ensure that for local markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China etc the localized content organically ranks higher than the default-English page? Thanks! Steve
International SEO | | sjcbayona-412180