.edu or country TLD, which one would be better?

[teconsite]

Hi,we are working right know with an Education Instutition located Outside the U.S. I think they would be in a possition where they could get de .edu TLD.

Right know they have good rankings in its own country cause they are working with their country specific TLD, and they rank well there. But, of course, a considerable percentage of their students are foreigners, so they are very interested in improving their interantional rankings (note that U.S is not a target market).

I was wondering if it would be ok to recommend them to change to the .edu TLD, because all their competitors have that tld too.

Whould that TLD increase their domain authority inmediatly? I know that .edu is well consider by google when it sends you a link, so it would be reasonable to think that having a .edu domain would be great, but as this domain is very related with the US and all their markets are outside the U.S, I am not sure about what recommend them.

What do you think??

Thank you!!!

[BenjaminMorel]

The .edu TLD is only available to institutions in the US. Further, it's limited to US-affiliated higher education institutions. So if your client were to purchase a .edu domain then anybody coming to the site would expect them to be US-based. But different countries do have their own education-related second-level .ac domains. So here in the UK ours is -surprise, surprise - .ac.uk.

I've not seen any recent correlation data on whether having a .edu will improve rankings. I know there has been a lot of talk over the last few years about .edu/.ac and .org domains being inherently "more trustworthy" than other domain types, but my personal opinion is that's confusing correlation and causation:  trustworthy institutions usually have .edu domains, it isn't the domain making them trustworthy. So changing to a .edu domain almost definitely won't help your rankings. It especially won't help your domain authority because this metric is concerned with measuring a range of things that you won't be changing, like your link profile..

Thinking about it, if changing to  a .edu domain were to help your rankings in the US because that's a primarily US TLD then that same logic say that change would also harm rankings in your client's home country, which they definitely won't want!

[GPainter]

.EDU and .gov etc. don't give any extra rank bonus

https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/4VaWg4TMM5F

I read a post by someone offering new top-level domain (TLDs). They made this claim: "Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will."

Sorry, but that's just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.more examples about too.