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.com vs .co.uk
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Hi, we are a UK based company and we have a lot of links from .com websites. Does the fact that they are .com or .co.uk affect the quality of the links for a UK website?
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The domain .com or .co.uk does not matter unless it is quality site. If it is a quality website it can help you to grow.
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Hi there,
In short, it won't matter too much as long as the links that you're getting are good quality and as relevant as possible to what you do. It's natural to get links from a wide range of domain extensions and there are perfectly legitimate reasons for this. For example, you may get a link from a .com website which may actually be for a UK based website who have decided to use this domain extension instead of a .co.uk.
Overall, if they look like good quality and relevant, don't worry

With that said, there is a concept around getting "local" links meaning more if you're serving a particular region or market. So it may make a small difference but it's not something that I'd worry loads about.
Hope that helps!
Paddy
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There are high DA domains like google.com. So, there is nothing wrong with having backlinks from .com domains. It's always recommended to check the authority and spam score for every linking domain regardless of the domain extension. The point is that ".com" is not necessarily lower quality than ".co.uk".
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