How to tell Google to consider a ccTLD website as gTLD?

[anand84]

One of my clients has a website targeted internationally but they have chosen a ccTLD to go with their business name (think something like redwidg.et ). Here .et is a ccTLD.

On the GWT page, I see a message that says " If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted." - but there appears to be no option to change it. Any pointers how to go about this?

[aakk9999]

I am affraid you cannot. ccTLD are already geotargetted to a country the TLD represent. This is why the "Unlisted" option is greyed out and not available for ccTLD.

[lucy24]

Hm. So YouTube is only available in Belgium, and The World's Leading Search Engine only in Greenland? Seems like there ought to be a loophole somewhere :(

[aakk9999]

Ah, you mean URL shortener for Youtu.be and goo.gl

The question was how to set up "Unlisted" for ccTLD in WMT, and it cannot be done. It does not mean that unless "Unlisted" it will not rank elsewhere :)

Theoretically there will be a small advantage for a country of the ccTLD. In practice, there are many other signals that fold in, such as language of the site, competition, inbound links, visitor location, etc. In fact, we just had someone with an oposite problem - a member whose ccTLD .ca site is ranking better on Google.com than on Google.ca despite .ca site being automatically geotargetted to Canada by Google ( [webmasterworld.com...] ).