I wonder if anyone tried promoting a website on a country-specific domain for the wrong region? I know there is no reason to do that (unless you're crazy), but I just became curious after my client said he'd prefer to keep an old .us domain while promotion is needed for a different country I advised him to get a .com or .net and set up a permanent redirect from the .us domain, but his hosting plan doesn't allow that and he really likes that hosting otherwise... so i thought maybe for the low-competition keywords this could actually work..
A:
The domain name will affect your ranking in some search engines, but the most important factor is the content.
The more your content is relevant to a region, the best ranking you will get.
When I type Microsoft in google using my fr-be browser (French/Belgium), the first result is not www.microsoft.com, but www.microsoft.com/fr/fr/default.aspx.
Google and other search engines will always try to bring me the most relevant page first (to me).
Pierre 303
2010-08-18 18:44:30
thanks for the replythats what i was thinking - maybe the content relevance will outweigh the default geo-targetingjust not comfortable guaranteeing the result in this caseif one day a competitor comes along with a good content AND right domain name, this one will probably get beaten easily.
SEO
2010-08-18 18:50:45
No the website that will wins will be the one that will provide the most relevant information to the user. Regardless the domaine name. However, if two websites has the same content, yes the domain name will count.
Pierre 303
2010-08-18 18:58:16