Hi,
I have a .CO.UK e-commerce site and I retail all over the world.


Will the fact that it is a .CO.UK affect my chances of being ranked on search engines by people searching for my product in other countries (i.e the United States)?


The .COM has already been taken.


Is there any benefits to registering the .US or .US.COM?


Are these as good as the .COM?


Or does it simply not matter and a CO.UK has an equally good chance of being ranked as any other domain?


Hope you can help.


Jimbob

Google and other search engines do take into account the locality of a domain when ranking searches although it shouldn't affect you to a great extent.

As long as your site is relevant to the search term it should get listed.

Jamie

It simply doesn't matter, except in regional search cases (e.g. a search for UK-only sites on Google will include yours because of the domain name).

You may, however, want to look at acquiring the .com version of the name. Be careful, because if it's taken and there's a trademark on it, you stand the chance of losing your .co.uk name as well. See this case for more information (the potterybarn.org domain is now the property of Williams-Sonoma.)

Thanks for the advice and it is reassuring to know I am OK with my .co.uk domain.

I guess the next thing for me is to get the company name professional trade marked.

Thanks

Jimbob

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

It simply doesn't matter, except in regional search cases (e.g. a search for UK-only sites on Google will include yours because of the domain name).

Just to give the appearance that I'm not a sycophant, I have to disagree with you every now and then. I think it will matter for non-seo reasons, but general marketing ... when you give someone your phone number, you normally leave out the area code, at least when you do it face to face. A .com is like whatever your local area code is; it's what people assume. Outside the UK, you'll have to emphasize the extension to minimize traffic loss to the .com version. Most people will get to it with their mouse somehow, by clicking a link, bookmarking, whatever ... but some will type directly into the address bar, and ideally some will type directly into an href attribute ( in other words give you a link ).

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

You may, however, want to look at acquiring the .com version of the name. Be careful, because if it's taken and there's a trademark on it, you stand the chance of losing your .co.uk name as well. See this case for more information (the potterybarn.org domain is now the property of Williams-Sonoma.)

Am I wrong, or did you never blog about that case in particular? You really should. Even if it isn't "news" anymore, it's funny enough without your unique take and brand of humor. Together, it's the perfect storm of spam funnies.

.com is global while .co.uk looks like only for UK

I have read in another forum a similar case of using a .com and a .co.uk in which his PR in google UK was higher compared to his PR in other google sites.

Most suggested that he just improve on his SEO and marketing his site to get the traffic he wants as PR doesn't really matter. And in the end, the original poster did realize to focus more in bringing in more traffic to his site

I would also suggest the same thing. Best of luck!

Well it is my understanding that the uk Domain will not perform as well for US users and vice versa. If you want to test this check it out for your self http://link.ezer.com/tools/google_se...nk_checker.asp I don't have any .co.uk domains, but I checked out a site belonging to a friend of mine and his results were much better in the UK and France. So draw your own conclusion, but you might consider looking into an alias with a more global appeal.
--Melanie

read http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...showtopic=6585 and the more upto date geolocation articles on Ian's site ( http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/...eolocation.asp )

Read through the HR Multilingual forum as well.

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

Am I wrong, or did you never blog about that case in particular? You really should. Even if it isn't "news" anymore, it's funny enough without your unique take and brand of humor. Together, it's the perfect storm of spam funnies.

No, sir, I haven't. I really don't know what I could say that hasn't been said on the thread already, though. Let's face it, the thread by itself is all the content anyone would need.

If I were going to do it, I should have done it when the silly thread got started, in hindsight.

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

No, sir, I haven't. I really don't know what I could say that hasn't been said on the thread already, though. Let's face it, the thread by itself is all the content anyone would need.

Maybe a recap for people who don't want to read all 85 posts?

The location of your server is something to consider

I mean the .co.uk top level domain will only affect what your visitors think about the site. To search engines it should not matter at all.

The only place I can think a machine would care is the BBC web search engine. There I have read that .co.uk will yield better ranking.

Notably the physical location of your server does matter.

To search engines it should not matter at all

Yes it does.
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/local-search-01.asp
http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/...eolocation.asp

suggestions regarding buying domain names. if you want much greater result in the aspects of SEO. create a domain that is keyword based. Try to get the .coms and i assure you, you will have great results you can possibly imagine.

No it won't

There has never been nor will there ever be a advantage over another domain for having a specific extension. Any of them can rank well if you put the time into link building the site and doing on page and off page seo properly.