Importance of country extension...

[krooga]

Hello all,
I have a question that has been running around in my head lately... Basically I would like to find out the importance of domain names country extension in search results. Say there are two french sites, with exactly the same content, the same number of BLs etc... One site is a .com domain and the other is a .fr domain (For info .fr is the official french domain extension). Now say a user does a search for a term listed in those sites on Google.fr or Yahoo.fr which is likely to come up higher ? The .fr or .com site ?

To sum up, does the country extension (.de, .us, .co.uk, .fr etc...) play a part in search engine results ?

Thanks for your help ;-)

Sam

[mcanerin]

Although the concept of 2 equal sites is purely theoretical (too many variables to actually make it happen outside of an internal lab inside a search engine with a limited and tightly controlled database), the theoretical answer to that is that the .fr site would get the higher ranking, currently.

Sites known to be regional get a boost in the regional engines. The CC TLD (ie .fr) is the fastest and most accurate way to assign regionality. In general, search engines seem to equate (in my experience, anyway) a higher level of confidence with a higher boost in rankings, all other things being equal.

In short, if they *know* that site#1 is a french site, and *believe* (based on link analysis, for example) that site#2 is a french site, then the one they are certain of will get a bigger boost than the one they are not certain of, and so forth, on a sliding scale.

Both will get the boost, but the amount of the boost is based on the confidence they have in their reasons for giving the boost, IMO.

Not being an SE engineer, this is an observation based on my own experiences, rather than a definitive answer, which I suspect only exists inside the SE's themselves.

Ian

[bill]

Also keep in mind the purpose of your site. Are you targeting a national market, or are you going after a language group? How is .com perceived in the local market compared to the local .tld? I realize this goes outside the scope of your question, but these are some marketing points that need to be considered.

Google reps have clearly stated several times that all you need to be considered a local site is local hosting or a local TLD. So, given your theoretical example, if the .com was hosted in France then both sites would rank the same...in Google.