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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

Just a heads up to anyone thinking of buy one of these:

Google ranks your site according to the TLD. Buying an .es vanity domain will tank your results in the English speaking world.

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Speaking as a reformed SEO nerd, Google does take it into account as part of their overall rankings, but by no means does that mean that your site will tank. They also know that your site is in English and that all the links are coming from English domains, etc.

Please source this. Plenty of popular domains using ccTLDs rank just fine.

Algorithm wise it would make sense that google would rank things like this as less worthy.

For one thing most authoritative domains for pagerank purposes are not going to have these "hacks" they are going to have the usual suspects (.com .net .org .edu .gov .info .etc to name the obvious US ones).

"Plenty of popular domains using ccTLDs rank just fine."

"Plenty" is not a large number when you are talking about tens of millions of sites that don't do it this way.

http://youtu.be/yJqZIH_0Ars

Thanks for that. Good information to know.

correct - it is one signal that comes into play. but what about a .es domain registered on an English host with an IP shared with English sites, English content, and English visitors? Google will rank that all day for English queries.

Shouldn't you also source yours, or does your anecdotal evidence outweigh his?

You are completely right. It's easy to ignore the rafter in your own eye. My apologies.

Ya, that's the point. It's not hipster if you can google it

"psh, I knew about that site before it was indexed"

Really? Well that just sucks. I was thinking of buying a good one I saw.

If you use a country code TLD, make sure it's on Google's list of generic ones (e.g. .io):

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1347922?hl=en

This is a good list to know! Thank you

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