Using geographic top level domains like that is somewhat confusing to
users, who expect that a site using a .se TLD is actually targeting
that area. For this reason, we do not allow sites using explicit
country-code top level domain names to set their geotargeting to a
different area.
That said, this should not negatively impact your site's ranking on a
global scale (you just wouldn't be able to say target "England"
explicitly).
I think you see that this is not a geographical case but simply
branding, owing to the fact that the .com version wasn't available.
There's many startups that don't use .com or generic extensions for
the brands. It would seem right if the control panel let you specify
two options (no targeting, or Sweden only) rather that automatically
set *.se to Sweden as it does.
I would like to confirm your last point about negative ranking through
an example:
- if the US and Sweden contained exactly the same country-specific
sites, content, pages and rankings (just an extreme hypothesis)
- if google indexed http://moonri.se in both country-specific settings
- when a user geographically in the US searched for moonrise, and so
did a user in Sweden, would they see it at the same position on
localised search results?
> Using geographic top level domains like that is somewhat confusing to
> users, who expect that a site using a .se TLD is actually targeting
> that area. For this reason, we do not allow sites using explicit
> country-code top level domain names to set their geotargeting to a
> different area.
> That said, this should not negatively impact your site's ranking on a
> global scale (you just wouldn't be able to say target "England"
> explicitly).
Going to your example, I don't think they would see it at exactly the
same position, I imagine the user in Sweden would see it somewhat
higher (since it's seen to be more local). However, that doesn't mean
that it's lower in the US than it would have been if it were using any
other top level domain. That said, this situation would never occur
since there are so many other factors involved (for example, if a user
in Sweden was looking for Swedish pages, he probably wouldn't be
presented with your English site that happened to use a Swedish top
level domain).
At any rate, for a global site I don't think this would be an issue.
It would however be more of a problem if you used a domain like
"fran.se" to target users in France. In a situation like that, I'm
sure you would agree that users would be confused to see a .se TLD
when searching for results in France. With a global audience, that
would generally not be a problem (after all, sites from Sweden should
be able to target a global audience as well :-)).
This brings up an interesting conversation about the role and
perception of domain extensions. For an original concept, like say,
http://del.icio.us - the brand was clearly a generic service, which
was then bought by yahoo and delicious.com was subsequently bought
too. In the majority however, I agree with you that in the present
time, domain extensions are the only clear indication of geographic
targeting. I think however, given the state and availability of
generic domains, this situation will begin shifting.
Do you agree with my suggestion of having two options in webmaster
central - i.e. Sweden only, or global? That would seem fair, since I
can't then go and pick "England" for example with just two options.
What happens with this data is an internal issue at google.
> Going to your example, I don't think they would see it at exactly the
> same position, I imagine the user in Sweden would see it somewhat
> higher (since it's seen to be more local). However, that doesn't mean
> that it's lower in the US than it would have been if it were using any
> other top level domain. That said, this situation would never occur
> since there are so many other factors involved (for example, if a user
> in Sweden was looking for Swedish pages, he probably wouldn't be
> presented with your English site that happened to use a Swedish top
> level domain).
> At any rate, for a global site I don't think this would be an issue.
> It would however be more of a problem if you used a domain like
> "fran.se" to target users in France. In a situation like that, I'm
> sure you would agree that users would be confused to see a .se TLD
> when searching for results in France. With a global audience, that
> would generally not be a problem (after all, sites from Sweden should
> be able to target a global audience as well :-)).
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