Impact of Your Site's TLD on SEO Ranking

[vampke]

Hi guys,

I am sure this was covered before, but I can't seem to find a decent topic on it (i did google for it).
From my search on the internetz I learned most people seem to agree on the fact that a tld does not affect site ranking.
This is not my experience at all.
I have the widgets.info site, where widgets is a pretty specialized topic with only very few websites available that have decent free content on these widgets (I happen to know quite a bit on the widgets). Most sites are advertisements for paid courses on these widgets or try to sell products related to the widgets.
Google should rank this site at the top but it doesn't.
The only reason I can come up with is the tld.
I have noticed my .org and .net sites score pretty well in google and I have found one interesting article [thegooglecache.com] regarding .org sites, but it dates from '08.
I would love to hear what you guys think about this?
Does anyone have experience with the .eu tld?

[goodroi]

Hi vampke,

I think you might be remembering the threads that debate the value of inbound links from different tlds. I don't remember recent discussions about which tld to use.

I can think of a few .info sites that are powerhouses with toolbar pagerank of 7 & 8s. They are mostly government sites that would be powerful regardless of what their tld was. Personally I would stay away from .info sites and try to stick with the old fashioned .com, .net & .org.

You can debate if Google penalizes .info sites or rewards .com site. I don't think it really matters because even if Google does not care about tld, other webmasters do care about it. I have a much better success rate when reaching out to webmasters for cross promoting & link exchanges with my .com sites then when I ask them about my .info sites. To make matters worse even when they agree to link to my .info sites they often link to the .com by mistake.

[jmccormac]

Based on the 2 million site .eu survey that I ran in October 2011, the .eu ccTLD is underdeveloped and very much a gateway TLD. It doesn't really have much credibility in the old EU but the newer Eastern EU member countries have almost replaced .com registrations with it as their second choice TLD. In most EU countries, the ccTLD/com axis would represent upwards of 80% of that country's domain name footprint and .eu is often between 2% and 5%. That would probably put it below .net and around the .org level. Using a .eu ccTLD domain for anything other than an EU-wide gateway domain or a domain that forwards to the relevant ccTLD website would be problematic.

Regards...jmcc