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.co.uk or .com ?

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homeriscool

homeriscool

Free Member
Aug 31, 2007
404
40
Cheshire
hi all , i just wanted to know if a .co.uk domain is only available to the british public ? or do i NEED a .com or .net etc to go worldwide?
 
A uk extension domain can be accessed by all and used by all. It's always adviseable to have both .co.uk and .com where possible.
 
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You really need a .com if you seriously want to sell worldwide but you can do it from a .co.uk. Where do you see the majority of your business coming from?
 
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No you don't NEED a .com to be worldwide. All dot whatevers can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Search engines will bias results to the appropriate region of the world though: ie: .com to the US., .co.uk to the UK, etc. However, you can ask google to favour a specific region and change it at any time (though I'd not do it weekly or even monthly, it's a real slow burn effect). If your 'Britishness' is part of your brand, then you might have a reason to favour a .co.uk. It is generally recommended, as someone above pointed out, that you purchase both... and I tend to agree though it's not always necessary. Being worldwide is much more to do with your content (and other SEO strategies) I'd say.
 
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Neyl said:
No you don't NEED a .com to be worldwide. All dot whatevers can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Search engines will bias results to the appropriate region of the world though: ie: .com to the US., .co.uk to the UK, etc. However, you can ask google to favour a specific region and change it at any time (though I'd not do it weekly or even monthly, it's a real slow burn effect). If your 'Britishness' is part of your brand, then you might have a reason to favour a .co.uk. It is generally recommended, as someone above pointed out, that you purchase both... and I tend to agree though it's not always necessary. Being worldwide is much more to do with your content (and other SEO strategies) I'd say.
Click to expand...

.com is not region specific is simply stands for commercial. .us the the official usa specific extension
 
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If you buy a .com - then ensure you host the site on UK servers, otherwise you'll face SEO issues when it comes to Google.co.uk.
Even though you can set the geo target with Google, it's takes a while to have any effect.

Best suggestion is to buy both.
 
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Indeed, I believe you're right about "commercial", though the association-in-use of .com is effectively USA now. I did say: "Search engines will bias their results...". Perhaps it was a bit lost and unclear: the dot suffixes shouldn't be considered region specific - but search engine behaviour responds to them as though they are. However, click the "pages from the UK" option in Google... see if you get any .com in the first 10 results? I've just done it searching on "books online". Amazon's .co.uk addresses dominate as you'd expect demonstrating the search engine's bias/emphasis... then there is tesco.com/books in the results along with other .com's.... again demonstrating my point that it's just bias not exclusion. Hope that's clarified my point. Regards.
 
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I use a .net and we had problems when we moved hosting a while back to 1and1 only to find we were hosted in Germany, we lost all our UK listings although we did very well for search engine optimisation in Germany lol

When we switched hosts we were back in a week, timeframe was dumped in a week, a week to rehost and a week to re-establish but of course we understood the problem, others have lost months.
 
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If you're targetting people in the uk then .com and .co.uk are largely interchangeable. However for people outside the UK, .co.uk is not quite so memorable - how often do you access .fr or .es or even .com.au sites? Personally I very rarely do it, and when I do I feel like it's not really aimed at me.
 
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hello the best way is to make sure you have
.co.uk
.com
.net
.biz

etc etc

however from a marketing perspective, if i were to be a company offering local services such as a driving school, because of seo I would take .co.uk

If you can export your product/service worldwide always take .com as your first pick.
.com is not seen as being American, but being more internet and original if that makes sense. People in the UK are far less likely to buy from .au .ie because there is an intrinsic perceived risk straight away.

Stick to a .com and you wont go far wrong.
Its the biggest and more people are familiar with .com than anything else

all the best

david poole
 
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