When is it best to use a ccTLD or TLD?

[iain]

I understand that the relative importance of domain extensions - .com is better than .biz, etc. - is a bit of a myth. I also believe that using a ccTLD is likely to affect rankings for that site outwith that country. But, is the opposite true?

Will giving a site a ccTLD help improve its SEO in that country? If you have a global organisation, is it better to establish a series of country specific sites - ccTLD - or to purchase the country specific domains and point them to the.com (if only to stop cyber-squatting)?

What if the company wanted to establish regional microsites that feature content about products only available within that region?

Many thanks,

Iain

[DorotheaKettler]

As far as I know last year Google started to penalize a great deal of cc TLD sites, since most of them were web directories and spam sites. TLDs are becoming less and less important, nevertheless I think using a cc TLD won't add any extra value to your SEO campaign..

[iain]

Hi Dorothea,

Sorry for the slow response and thanks for your reply. I still see country-specific sites performing well in their own home market. Is this more to do with where the host is located than the ccTLD?

Cheers,

Iain

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Iain,

Great question. Like a lot of things in SEO, the answer of whether or not to use a ccTLD is... it depends.

Pros

Using a country level domain can boost your SEO targeting in that specific area, may help with click-through rate depending on local biases, and sometimes it's easier to create a country specific "brand" with this approach.

Cons

You have to do SEO for each site. Your Italian site may get links, which doesn't help your German site. Duplicate content becomes an issue if you publish the same articles on multiple sites. Maintaining muplitple sites becomes harder.

Questions to Ask

Will you publish content in multiple languages? If so, will you publish multiple versions of the same content? If so, you will want to make use of the hreflang tag.

Are you targeting specific countries, or multi-country regions? If it's the latter, than a single domain may be more efficient.

I'm not a true expert on international SEO, but one of the best overviews of the topic I've seen is this WBF by Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-where-to-host-and-how-to-target-whiteboard-friday You may also want to check out this post: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust

Regardless, hope this gives you something to think about. Best of luck with your SEO!