Hello everyone, I've tried searching for this question - if it has been asked before please forward me on to the relevant link. Here's the question: If someone lives in New Zealand (like me) and they go to www.google.co.nz - that being the local version of Google, when they search for something - often .co.nz websites will come up, ahead of .com's that normally would. What I'm unsure of is how much more weight is placed on .co.nz addresses as compared to the .com's? If I'm attempting to optimise a .co.nz page for a keyword that is ultra-competitive with all the .com's then obviously Google somehow places more emphasis when it sees .co.nz addresses. Because Google is all about relevance - so if a New Zealander was searching for say 'Jewellery', it's supposedly better to present .co.nz websites (being local companies) as opposed to .com's. I'm trying to understand the weighting and relevance, so that I can better plan how much work I need to do to optimise the .co.nz site. Thanks Sean - New Zealand
Hi. Stay with me on this, I'm a bit of a newbie, but I think I actually know this one You'll notice when you do a google search that you are offered the option of 'search the web' or search 'new zealand' (which is usually ticked by default)...Now, Google (I think) caches the sites by geo-targeting via Sever IP, meaning if you're hosted in New Zealand you're more relevant to the a person 'searching' from new zealand. When I've tried to be uncompromising with my SEO (and I haven't done it many times), I visit google spot com (can't add URLs), as the results returned, don't index by geographical location... I think that's about right, but I probably wouldn't bet my granny on it additional note: I guess what I'm trying to say is: The URL Extention doesn't matter...But I might be wrong...hmmm
Pretty close, Constantine. What Google is doing is taking local results (in this case from sites with a .co.nz TLD which may or may not also be hosted in New Zealand itself, but is not required) and giving them additional "weight" due to the fact that these Web sites are "country specific" (again, in this case, to New Zealand). Afterall, Google thinks that someone would be more likely to search a site that's "based" (for lack of a better word) in New Zealand than, say, the Isle of Man or some podunk town in the middle of Rhode Island.
I actually did a case study on this that confirmed that a significant amount of weight is given to the country specific TLD. Basically, a site was moved from a subfolder of a .com to its own country-specific domain and resulted in a substantial increase in rankings.
Dan is right. Google may give some weightage to .co.nz domains when searched from google.co.nz. A long time back I had read somewhere (seobook?) that Google take more than 200+ parameters into consideration while ranking pages. This is just one of it. By the way, Google gives equal weightage to all top level domains, so as per matt cutts, .com,.info and org are all same.