Foreign Domain Names

How success in Google can they be?

[Newboy]

The URL I want is taken in .com etc. There is one available in .cn (China). Does anyone know if I'd be penalised in Google for a foreign TLD? I can often see .tv's and .cc's etc. My site is a global site for anyone who speaks english.

[Shak]

I would NOT advise the chinese extension for a global site.

SEs might not penalise you, but the public is not ready yet.

what about .net or .org

alternatively .info or .biz

or then .us .cc .tv .to etc etc

Shak

[heini]

What Shak says.
It's the users you have to take into consideration. The SEs couldn't care less.

I really have to wonder where on earth people get this misconception that search engines penalize "foreign" TLDs. What is a "foreign" TLD in the first place? Depends on where you sit, where the SE sits, and finally where your user sits, right?

Basically it's like this:
generic TLDs com, org, net, info, biz
Then there's edu and gov, which are generic, but only inside the US. Don't know the historic background.

cc (country code) TLDs us, fr, se, pl, ru, de, dk, ...you name them

In theory ccTLDs should be used by people inside the country. In practise this has for most ccTLDs never been that way.

Now all major engines operate international. To them a TLD means nothing. They only use TLDs for filtering, like giving users the option to filter for results from a country. And even in that respect it's a secondary criteria: language is the primary.

So on what grounds should SEs penalize domains under a specific TLD?

[rpking]

I think by foreign Newboy means that when on, for example, google.it, a .fr domain name would be foreign.

> So on what grounds should SEs penalize domains under a specific TLD?

Does this mean that in a hypothetical situation where all else is equal, example.com would not rank any higher than example.fr when searching on google.com?

And also, example.com would not rank any higher than example.fr when searching on google.it?

[heini]

>example.com would not rank any higher than example.fr when searching on google.it

No. And why should it?
If a user wants to filter for local results, or results from his native language, he can always do so from the search options.
If a user searches the www, there's absolutely no reason to prefer one TLD over any other.