ccTLD / TLD and SEO

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greyhoundcode
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ccTLD / TLD and SEO

Post by greyhoundcode »

As I understand it, and I am far from an SEO guru, if a UK business trading in rubber stamps has a website, then rubber-stamp-company.co.uk is preferable to rubber-stamp-company.com.

But what if this UK company is targeting the US market, would .com then become preferable, or is this all a bit of an SEO red herring and the TLDs don't really matter?
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greyhoundcode
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Re: ccTLD / TLD and SEO

Post by greyhoundcode »

Anybody? :wink:
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Weirdan
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Re: ccTLD / TLD and SEO

Post by Weirdan »

That depends on what search engine (and what localization) you're targeting. For example, if your visitors are mostly from google.co.uk, then getting .co.uk domain is preferable (4 of 5 top results for 'rubber stamps' on google.co.uk are in .co.uk TLD).
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greyhoundcode
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Re: ccTLD / TLD and SEO

Post by greyhoundcode »

Yeah that's an interesting test (rubber stamps was of course a hypothetical example :wink:), but thanks for the prompt. Also interesting, at least to me, was that the same search conducted via Yahoo UK does not return a similar ratio of .co.uk to other TLDs.

I wonder though if (in your example) the high number of returns with .co.uk TLDs could be coincidental, and it is the content and other factors that drive people to click through and boost the search rating of a given site, or whether the TLD itself has a direct bearing on a website's ranking.
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Weirdan
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Re: ccTLD / TLD and SEO

Post by Weirdan »

I don't know if there's causal relation in 'google.co.uk => most results from .co.uk' (it likely is), but the correlation is obviously strong (you might want to throw google.com.au into the comparison). Whether it's people preferring their local results or search engine itself preferring local resources wouldn't really matter to me if I was doing SEO and targeting that local market, I would just exploit this correlation.
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