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
-
Does an EAT score on my YMYL site impact my rankings?
I've read some conflicting information on YMYL and EAT. If the Google Quality Raters are out there reviewing YMYL pages and scoring them on EAT, does that site's score have an impact on that page's/site's ranking?
Algorithm Updates | | BFMichael0 -
Do keyword target landing pages increase rankings?
Let's say we create landing pages for targeted keywords in our niche. So like we have landing pages optimised for 80% of the top keywords with decent search volume. If these pages started ranking at first page or around; will this scenario improves the ranking of website? Right now, only few of our top pages are ranking good. Planning to create more of such.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Less relevant/not optimized competitor sites ranking higher in SERPs?
Has anyone else noticed their rank positions falling to competitor sites that aren't optimized and are less relevant? I've noticed that we've lost some rankings or have dropped over the past few weeks and the competitor pages that have replaced us haven't been optimized, aren't as relevant, and it doesn't look like there has been any updates (looking through archived versions). For example, their main "shoes" gallery is ranking for more specific shoe types, like "sandals", and "sandals" isn't even mentioned in their metadata and they have no on-page copy. Their DA is slightly higher, but our sites have a denser link profile (although, yes, I do need to go through and see what kind of links, exactly, we've gained). Has anyone else seen this happen recently, or have any ideas of why or what we could do to get our rank positions back? My main initiatives have been to create and implement fresh on-page copy, metadata, and manage 404s/301 redirects, but I'm thinking this issue is beyond a quick copywriting tweak.
Algorithm Updates | | WWWSEO0 -
Is user engagement a ranking signal?
Read something about user engagement might be a signal that Google uses, along with links and on-site optimisation, to decide if a search result goes up or down. What should I believe and what are the developments in this field?
Algorithm Updates | | MozzieJr0 -
Do scraped or borrowed articles with my links still pass page rank?
I wrote some articles for Ezine Articles a few years back and i still see links in the ose to my site that are from these articles that were borrowed from the Ezine Articles bank. Do the links in these articles still count toward my site including link juice and anchor text or does google discount them as duplicate content? I was told that Google counts these links for about 3 weeks and then discounts them as duplicate content so it's like they don't exist. Any truth to this or should i make the articles on my site available for people to copy and paste into their blogs as long as they keep my links intact? Thanks, Ron
Algorithm Updates | | Ron100 -
Rank Tracking & Personalized Search
How effective is rank tracking when google tends to deliver personalized search? I tend to clear out my browser of all info, cookies and cache so I can get the best results but how effective are rank tracking algo's in delivering accurate results. I run various apps and tests and I get different results.
Algorithm Updates | | bronxpad0 -
Google Page Rank?
We have had a quality website for 12 years now, and it seems no matter how many more links we get and how much new content we add daily, we have stayed at PR3 for the past 10 years or so. Our SEOMoz domain authority is 52. We have over 950,000 pages linking to us from 829 unique root domains. Is this in line with PR3 or should we be approaching PR4 soon? We do daily blog posts with all unique, fresh quality content that has not been published elsewhere. We try to do everything with 'white hat' methods, and we are constantly trying to provide genuine content and high quality products, and customer service. How can we improve our PR and how important is PR today?
Algorithm Updates | | applesofgold0 -
Today all of our internal pages all but completely disappeared from google search results. Many of them, which had been optimized for specific keywords, had high rankings. Did google change something?
We had optimized internal pages, targeting specific geographic markets. The pages used the keywords in the url title, the h1 tag, and within the content. They scored well using the SEOmoz tool and were increasing in rank every week. Then all of a sudden today, they disappeared. We had added a few links from textlink.com to test them out, but that's about the only change we made. The pages had a dynamic url, "?page=" that we were about to redirect to a static url but hadn't done it yet. The static url was redirecting to the dynamic url. Does anyone have any idea what happened? Thanks!
Algorithm Updates | | h3counsel0