Do you believe TLD distribution effects rankings in Google?

[alohav]

I have noticed that when looking at TLD distribution of backlinks for many websites that have grown organically, the TLD distribution is somewhat consistent depending on the style of website (I am using MajesticSEO to find this distribution data). Do you feel deviating from this TLD distribution depending on the style of website you have would cause negative effects with Google? Has there been any testing of this that you know of that you can point me to (ex: building all backlinks from .info TLDs and seeing if you rank well for given keywords)?  I ask because my companies website has seen some big deviations from this and although I don't see any negative effects currently I want to make sure we create a site that stays consistent with what Google is looking for.

For example, if I look at news sites such as New York Times and Los Angeles Times, I see TLD distributions as such:

nytimes.com
.com = 59%
.gov = 14%
.org = 12%
.uk = 2%
.edu = 2%

latimes.com
.com = 59%
.org = 13%
.gov = 11%
.edu = 4%
.net = 2%
.uk = 2%

From that, if you are a news site, my assumption would be to try to stay consistent with around 55-65% of your links coming from .com domains, around 9-15% from .org, etc etc .

Now, looking at large blog styles sites I see this distribution:

naturalnews.com
.com = 70%
.org = 11%
.edu = 3%
.net = 2%
.gov = 1%

techcrunch.com
.com = 71%
.org = 10%
.edu = 4%
.net = 3%
.gov = 1%

Any input or links to tests of this would be much appreciated.

[KaneJamison]

I don't believe that it directly affects rankings, but it's certainly a reasonable method to red flag a domain for unnatural looking link profiles. It would also be natural to compare them to similar sites as you pointed out. News vs News, Gov vs Gov, Video site vs Video site, etc.

"From that, if you are a news site, my assumption would be to try to stay consistent with around 55-65% of your links coming from .com domains, around 9-15% from .org, etc etc ."

No way - I'd attempt to build all of the quality links I could - to hell with what's 'typical', doing what's typical will only get you typical results. You have to outperform to rank better, and trying to stay within a natural profile as determined by your competitors' efforts is not what makes you shine.

So, I definitely don't think going outside the typical profile would automatically have a negative affect, but I definitely think accumulating an extreme number of .info links looks spammy, and if I ran a search engine it would definitely be one method I would use for red flagging sites for manual reviews. Going outside the natural link profile might get you looked at by the webspam team, if they ever get around to it, but if you're playing by their link quality rules I don't think you need to worry. Eventually the TLD landscape is going to change from where it is now, and Google is fully aware of that and unlikely to punish you unless the links suck.

[Sebes]

I agree. I would argue that tld distribution is partly determined by link sources (i.e. what country the page is located in) and the targeted pages language/country. So a strong deviation from that will probably red flag a domain. Exampel: a page hosted in Germany, about Africa recieving tons of links from china might be fishy. A page in Poland about Germany getting links from Poland (or Germany) might be totally relevant, but with differently tld distribution.

EDIT: So the best rule of thumb is to ask yourself "If a human QA rep would look at the page and it's links, what would he think?"

[AlanMosley]

Good question and good answers, I would like to add, that I dont think that any one thing will get you flaged, as it is posible that something in a story about africa may be funny or important to China and may go viral, but mixed with other suss signals it well could be a reason to flag

[alohav]

Thank you for taking the time to respond. Your response seems consistent to what I would have concluded. We'll see if anyone is able to chime in with any links to testing that was done in regards to this question.

[KaneJamison]

My pleasure. While I'm still thinking about backlink profiles, there's a post by John Doherty about analyzing your backlink profile vs. competitors based upon Domain Authority. I think this is a more worthwhile way to analyze your own backlink profile for spam. I won't speculate if Google is doing anything similar.

You can find the article here: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/three-phenomenal-excel-spreadsheets-for-link-analysis/

Also read this follow up post about what a bad backlink DA profile will look like: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/paid-links-backlink-profile-visualized/