Ranking gcctld?
-
I am working on a new site that uses a .io TLD. I have just started working to get the domain to rank for its own name.
What are some others experience with ranking and SEO for gcctlds?
-
As an update I am seeing a very slow start to getting the domain to rank in the top 200 results for its own name (riley). By this time with a .com I would usually have seen my site somewhere in the top 100 without much effort. Although, I haven't started a new domain from scratch for a competitive key work like "riley" in a while. I will continue to build links and eventually do more marketing when the site if further along.
Let me know if anyone else has had some of the same experiences with gccTLD rankings.
Thanks!
-
Awesome! The dev community has been using .io for a while, so it is natural that it gets considered a gccTLD. Really good to here him mention it.
-
Matt Cutts must have been reading this thread - check it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJqZIH_0Ars
He mentions using .io as a "non geographic" specific domain.
-
Wish I could help you out more here, but I don't have much experience in this realm. All of my work has only ever been on .coms. Sorry!
-
Both of you have great advise and appreciate your help. Have you ever worked on getting a gccTLD to rank or competed for keyword targets with a gccTLD?
-
.io gets used a lot around the world as a general TLD, so Google no longer assumes that it's a site targeted to the British Indian Ocean Territory (here is their help center file on this). Your site will be treated similarly as any other gTLD. This is probably true for Bing as well, but I couldn't find any documentation about it.
If you're not US-specific, I'd leave the country targeting blank in Google/Bing webmaster tools. Either way I wouldn't expect it to make a huge difference. Just know that Google doesn't think you're trying to target the British Indian Ocean Territory based on your TLD choice. As CleverPhD pointed out, they use a bunch of other factors to help determine this as well.
-
Here is the Google info on what the Geotargeting does
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en
They would look at the extension, but also where you are hosted, location information on the site (eg your address) etc.
As far as who you target with the settings
"The tool handles geographic data, not language data. If you're targeting users in different locations—for example, if you have a site in French that you want users in France, Canada, and Mali to read—we don't recommend that you use this tool to set France as a geographic target. A good example of where it would be useful is for a restaurant website: if the restaurant is in Canada, it's probably not of interest to folks in France. But if your content is in French and is of interest to people in multiple countries/regions, it's probably better not to restrict it."
So, it depends on what users you want to target. If you truly want to be international, do not set it. I bet if your site is in english and your are hosted in the US and your physical address is in the US, Google will show you as a US site.
-
Great tip! I had setup webmaster tools, but not checked this setting. My location was set to the "-" by default. I changed it to US, does this mean that if I want to target international traffic I won't be able to?
Is this the same in bing? Going to look now.
-
One quick suggestion. Make sure in Google webmaster tools under site settings that when you verify the domain that you properly specify your location. I am betting that you are not based in the middle of the Indian Ocean!
Also there is a great answer here
http://moz.com/community/q/do-domain-extensions-such-as-com-or-net-affect-seo-value
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
-
About porn sites and ranking
Hello, I'm thinking to extend my website into porn. At the moment there is no pornography on it, although we do talk about sex related topics and products (from dating to tutorials, to toys etc.) Would it be dangerous to keep the porn section on the same domain as the rest? Would this negatively affect my non-porn content as Googlebot would "flag" my website as being pornographic (although only a few pages would be)? Or simply Googlebot would leave the current non-porn pages ranking as they are now, just fine, and plus it would rank the porn pages if they "deserve" to? I hope my question is clear. I don't want to create a subdomain.
Algorithm Updates | | fabx0 -
Lost Wikipedia page and dropped heavily in rankings. How many of you aware of and experienced this?
Hi all, We lost of our Wikipedia page for 2nd time and we dropped in rankings 2nd time too. I got confused first time whether Wikipedia was the actual reason as we had couple of major changes in our website. But recently it's been clear that losing Wikipedia page is the culprit as we have no website changes around these days. How many of you aware of this and experienced this? Please share your views. Hope this info will help you. Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Can site blocked for US visitors rank well internationally?
Because of regulatory reasons, a stock trading site needs to be blocked to United States visitors Since most of google datacenters seem to be located in the US, can this site rank well in the other countries where does business despite being blocked in the US? Do U.S. Google data centers influence only US rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | tabwebman0 -
Why is site dropping in rank after we update it?
One of our sites - supereyes.com - appears to drop in rank after we update it. The client notified us of this today and I've verified that it did indeed drop in Google -- four spots since last week. He says this happens every time we make changes to the site, but then a week later it will go back up and is usually higher than where it was before. I have not verified this, but I'm very worried it may not rise again In the past week, we've posted a new blog entry to their site and we've changed some of the content -- specifically, added their locations to the header, added a contact page and put two testimonials in their sidebar. We've also had someone submitting their site to directories and local business sites like Angie's List and so forth. There are about 16 new backlinks established in the past 2-3 weeks. Also, I should note, traffic is higher than it's ever been, but the client doesn't look at traffic. They only look at their Google results. Can anyone offer any insight into what's going on here and if I need to be worried the site won't rise again in the rankings?
Algorithm Updates | | aloley0 -
How long does it take for a website to starting ranking once the website becomes live?
I am in the process of finishing the last touches on my new company's website and I am wondering about the process of getting my new website to rank on google. I've heard many different things from many different people who believe they know everything about SEO, but they can't all be right. Is there a definite timeline? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | uofmiamiguy0 -
Webmaster Tools Crawl Stats Drop - Ranks Dropped too
Hello, So I have a situation I haven't seen that happened today. I checked in on my keyword rankings, and all seemed to drop off the rankings in one day. Even googling my domain name, I'm not the first result (when I always have been with multiple sublinks under). There were no unusual errors in the webmaster tools, no issues "Fetching as Google". The only thing I can find is in Crawl Stats, my "Kilobytes downloaded per day" and "Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds)" dropped a lot in the last day or so (by about 90%). Has anyone had this happen? Any ideas for how to bounce back from this? Domain referenced is mediamegamall.com Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | Ask_MMM0 -
Do you believe CTR affects rankings
As you know, Google tracks CTR on keywords for your website visible through google Webmaster Tools. How much if at all do you believe this affects your rankings on the tracked keywords?
Algorithm Updates | | TheGrid0 -
Videos increase ranking of products in SERPS from Ecommerce Website
Just noticed something I've never seen before..and I just wanted to see if anyone else experienced this. I work for a 15000+ item eccommerce website, and today I noticed that on a few brand searches, several individual product pages were coming up. This is actually unusual because most of our individual item pages (including these) aren't ranked well enough to show up well in a brand search (and don't try to target brand terms either), but a correlation here was that both items contained videos referenced within. These were not videos hosted on our YouTube brand page either..these were videos done by separate manufacturers - one was hosted on their site, one on ours. Google actually pulled the snapshot of the video to the SERP as well... even though it was embedded within other product copy. Has anyone else noticed any preferential treatment given to effectively random items on your eCommerce website because it was augmented by video? I can assure you there was nothing otherwise unique about these products and they're not really that sought after. Neither item or url was new, and neither were the videos within. Also, this was a Universal Google search, not one for videos. (Sorry, I'm not allowed to reference directly). Thanks.
Algorithm Updates | | Blenny0