TLDs

To find out if your website is treated as a generic domain, John recommends accessing the international settings in GSC and seeing if you can set an international target.

Sites with a ccTLD can be relevant to countries outside of the one associated with the TLD. However, a ccTLD won’t be able to geo-target other specific countries.

ccTLDs only work at a country level, so you can have ccTLDs for the different countries in Africa but you can’t have one ccTLD targeting the whole of Africa.

Server IP addresses used to be a signal in the early days of Google’s geotargeting. Now Google uses ccTLD, generic TLD, hreflang, as well as settings in Google My Business and Google Search Console in combination to infer geotargeting information which is much more useful than a single IP.

Google will automatically apply geotargeting to ccTLDs meaning you will get a slight boost in rankings for searchers in that country.

There is no way to disavow an entire TLD. John advises against doing this as individual links aren’t reflective of the entire content of a site. Google is also getting better at recognising and ignoring unnatural links itself anyway.

Google will promote ccTLDs for that specific country but you can’t set up geo-targeting for other countries outside of that ccTLD.

Regional domains which don’t targe specific countries, such as .berlin, will be treated as top-level domains and won’t have any geographic targeting applied.

If you don’t select a geotargeting option for generic TLDs, Google will assign this automatically, whereas choosing ‘Unlisted’ will tell Google not to apply any geotargetting.

Don’t use a country specific top level domain (e.g. .it) as this will tell Google that the site is primarily for that country.