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Most ccTLDs are heavily weighted by Google in favour of their locale, in practice this means if you use a ccTLD you can expect to suffer from a ranking penalty outside of the ccTLDs locale. If you use a .it domain you can expect to rank well in Italy but to rank poorly in the United States.

The exception to this rule are "generic" ccTLDs, Google has a number of generic ccTLDs, these are ccTLDs that they will treat as if they're not ccTLDs. This includes .io, .me and .tv[1].

I used to run a site from httpstatus.es, last year I switched the site from .es (Spain) to generic (.com) and have seen a significant increase in search engine traffic. Here is a 3 year traffic chart, red box is the switch from .es to .com: http://i.imgur.com/60RXFjP.png

I am confident from my own experience that there is a big penalty associated with using a non-generic ccTLD and businesses should be very careful when choosing a ccTLD if search engine traffic is meaningful to their business.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en (scroll down to "More about domain determination")

discuss

pdappollonio|9 years ago

Dot me and dot TV are actually local domains, not ccTLD. The first one is from Montenegro and the second one is from the Island of Tuvalu. Although common sense has made a lot to make them look global, they're fairly local because they're not too much used for their intended purpose.

AlBentley|9 years ago

I have been thinking about this a lot. How were you able to measure the fact you were ranking poorly before making the switch?

We use a .st domain, and whilst it is not explicitly mentioned on Googles generic list there are very few localized .st sites so I am hoping Google is counting it as a generic domain.

Note most of our users are in the US!

pyk|9 years ago

This is great information -- thank you. Do you have any general advice for switching over from one domain & TLD to another -- i.e., setting up redirects, etc... for those that have linked to the previous domain, as well as for Google indexing (e.g., Google webmaster tools)?