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ccTLDs

What are ccTLDs?

Bring your grown-up to work day:

Probably most recognizable as the letters after the final period in a domain name (e.g., the "mx" in www.example.mx), a ccTLD shows users and search engines in what country, sovereign state, or dependent territory a website is registered — and usually, by extension, where in the world searchers who will find this site relevant reside.

In each of the following examples, the ccTLD is bolded:

  • http://www.sample.fr (France)
  • http://www.sample.co.uk (United Kingdom)
  • http://sample.com.eu (European Union)
  • http://sample.中国 or http://sample.cn (China)

Country code TLDs use the ISO 3166-1 country codes except in a few rare cases, where ASCII identifiers are used instead (for instance, .uk instead of .gb). In some cases (including Arabic and Chinese), TLDs using non-Latin characters are also available — these are called internationalized country code top-level domains (IDN ccTLDs or ccIDNs).

Why ccTLDs matter

Important in international SEO, ccTLDs are the single strongest way to show search engines and users that site content is specifically targeted to a certain country or region — but, importantly, NOT specifically a certain language. When a site uses a ccTLD, Google assumes that site (and all the content on it) is specifically relevant to the geographic area targeted by the ccTLD and should appear on SERPs in that area.

Using ccTLDs

The net result? If example.fr, example.us, and example.com are equal in quality, authority, trustworthiness, and other optimizations, example.fr will likely rank better in a French user's SERP than example.us or example.com.

When ccTLDs become gccTLDs

Although the majority of ccTLDs are associated with content specific to their corresponding country or region, some webmasters have started using country codes like ".me" and ".tv" as generic web addresses. As a result, Google has, over time, decided to treat some of those ccTLDs as generic country code top-level domains (gccTLDs) rather than ccTLDs. But, Google's former Head of Webspam Matt Cutts advises caution if you decide to use a ccTLD that is not already considered a gccTLD because your content could be considered geotargeted (which could affect your global search rankings). You can find a list of the country codes Google considers gccTLDs (and are thus safer to use universally) on this page.

Using ccTLDs

The most common use case for ccTLDs is to "internationalize" website content, and using a ccTLD is the strongest signal you can send a search engine that your content focuses on a specific country.

Country code TLDs can be useful in the right situations, but they do come with a few caveats:

  • Say, for example, you're the owner of both www.tinydancinghorse.fr and www.tinydancinghorse.be. Because they are seen by search engine crawlers as two entirely separate sites, any link equity passed to one ccTLD site stays there — it does not also impact the other site. So, if you're the owner of both sites, you'll need to build up the authority of each ccTLD separately.
  • It can be more expensive to purchase and maintain all of the ccTLDs that are relevant to your business. If you have extensive resources this might not be an issue, but to get around this some webmasters choose to use subdirectories and/or subdomains to direct users from different countries to the appropriate content for them.
  • Depending on the ccTLD, someone seeking to register a domain may be required to be affiliated (as a citizen or otherwise) with the country to qualify to use that ccTLD. Here's a list of most of those restrictions (check out the "Notes" column).

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