Google Confirms Ranking Boost For Country Code Domains

Google’s Gary Illyes answered a question about a ranking preference given to sites that use country level domain names and explained how that compares to non-country domain names. The question occurred in the SEO Office Hours podcast.

ccTLD Aka Country Code Domain Names

Domain names that are specific to countries are called ccTLDs (Country Code Top Level Domains). These are domain names that target specific countries. Examples of these ccTLDs are .de (Germany), .in (India) and .kr (Korea). These kinds of domain names don’t target specific languages, they only target Internet users in a specific country.

Some ccTLDs are treated by Google for ranking purposes as if they are regular Generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), which are domains that are not specific to a country. A popular example is .io, which technically is a ccTLD (pertaining to the British Indian Ocean Territory) but because of how it’s used, Google treats it like a regular gTLD (generic top level domain).

Ranking Boosts For ccTLDs

The question that Gary Illyes answered was about the ranking boost given to ccTLDs.

This is the question:

“When a Korean person searches Google in Korean, does a com.kr domain or a .com domain do better?”