International SEO and Website Redirection

[AngelosS]

Hey there Mozzers,

If you have a website for example www.example.com and you wanted to target Australia and UK and you owned the .com.au and .co.uk.

Would that be ok if everything redirected to the .com ?

I know that having the .com.au is a signal for Google but the redirection is causing me troubles. Would that be huge of a difference if everything redirected to the .com version of the site?

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Angelo,

Those location-specific domains are what we refer to as a ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain) and while they are a minor signal to both search engines and users, if they're being 301'd to the .com they won't be offering any signals at all. The only way they'd be passing strength is if they have backlinks pointing to them. If this is the case, you can expect ~80-90% of this strength to be passed via the redirect, the same as a standard link according to Matt Cutts in 2013.

If you really wanted to put those ccTLDs to good use you could create a geo-specific site on each one and have them rank individually for their respective country however I generally recommend against doing this simply because you're tripling the amount of time and budget that's required since each domain has to stand on its own merit.