Future of .cctld in Search Engines

Same value as .com eventually?

[walkman]

What are your thoughts on country specific names (like widget.lu for example)? Will Google and SEs finally allow people to make it possible to geotarget them or will they always be a distant second when it comes to the .com? From my experience it's many,many times harder to rank in US with a country specific name.

Google apparently surrendered on .me and you can geotarget them to the US market. Will they do the same with other names? What do you think?

Edit:same value I meant as far as SE are concerned, with all other things being equal.

[bill]

Some ccTLDs are being used to make cash for the owners, and some are being used as legitimate ccTLDs. I'm guessing the SEs can determine which are which. Targeting those domains for locations other than the original country should be an option.

[HuskyPup]

Will Google and SEs finally allow people to make it possible to geotarget them or will they always be a distant second when it comes to the .com?

In my experience Google are already doing that and reasonably successfully since in the areas I monitor regularly .coms definitely do not dominate.

I had an interesting example of this last night when I was checking Google.im for results and the #1 was a .im result. Now considering that .im is tiny in comparison to nearly all extensions I was pretty suprised about that.

In my sector Bing results seem to be totally local with hardly any difference between Show All and Only From The United Kingdom.

Yahoo I hardly ever check but a quick look now suggests similar to Bing...YMMV

.

[walkman]

Husky,
I meant: will you be able to tell Google that widget.im is being used for US audiences? .Im should rank #1 in google.im

[HuskyPup]

You can tell Google that example.tld is intended for USA however whether they have any control over their algos is a totally different thing altogether! I see sites, like many others, that have absolutely no right to be ranking well until one sees their Google advertising expenditure...ahhhh...no influence then?

Pure luck now IMHO for new sites...do the Americans call it a crap shoot? I'm not too sure what that means but in the UK it's a perfect example of pot luck!

10 years after the .com bust monetary power play has re-established itself big-time...fait-accompli...they were crapping themsleves for awhile though!