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That's super helpful, thank you. My GTLD would be a brand term, perhaps the closest description would be 'B.bc' (if that existed) or The.times (again, if that existed). In these examples, would the URL be interpreted as BBC and thetimes or just 'B' and 'the'?

Hi Jimmy,

Great to hear from you. My initial reaction is that it might be trickier to rank with the .co.uk, as well. Context wise, I hope this helps... this would be for a B2B website that sells into various countries, including the likes of Spain, Italy, Germany, as well as China, Vietnam, Thailand and more.

Primarily we'd be looking to rank for our brand name in various different languages, e.g. simplified Chinese, Thai, German, all from a .co.uk.

My initial suspicion is that a .co.uk may be trickier than getting a .com or country specific TLDs ranking (e.g. brandname.cn brandname.de), especially with Baidu which doesn't seem to have a lot of love for .co.uks.

Based on this, would you stick with .co.uk, go global with a .com or country specific with ccTLDs for each target market?

Holly

Bit of a specific one, but if there's anyone that can help it's you guys. If a .co.uk website is looking to rank in Baidu with a .co.uk/cn subdirectory, would we require an Internet Content Publishing License? Taking a step back, it might be there's two parts to my question:

1. How likely is it a .co.uk. could rank in Baidu, with simplified Chinese language content?

2. In order to have a chance of ranking, would we require an Internet Content Publishing License?

Hopefully someone can shed some light on this for me. Reading about GTLDs, I came across this quote from TSO Host:

'What we don’t know is whether an extension can double up as a keyword, which is picked up by Google and treated identically to the rest of a domain name. I.e. - would ‘bristolguitars.music’ have more ranking potential than ‘bristolguitars.com’ as ‘music’ is a relevant search word?' _Source: https://www.tsohost.com/blog/how-do-new-gtlds-affect-seo_

Does anyone know if a GTLD extension does double up as a keyword? For example, if Nike buys 'Nike.shoes', does this double as the keyword 'Nike shoes', or is Google and other search engines just looking at the domain name _before _the GTLD extension? I'm looking at .photography for examples (not my niche) and seeing folks are having mixed results ranking for 'Keyword + Photography', so would be keen to hear your thoughts.

That's super helpful, thank you. American markets aside, are there any other countries where it would be a hindrance?

I'm hoping someone in the Moz community can help me with this one! Essentially, we have a .co.uk brand which wants to have more of an international presence. My question is, purely based on the fact that we're a .co.uk, will we find it more challenging to develop a search engine presence in European/BRIC markets? In a perfect world, we'd have a .com/country or a .es/ etc, but if this isn't possible, how hindered are we if we stick with the .co.uk and want to build a presence in Spain?