How Google Handles New Top Level Domains (TLDs)

new top level domains

In a Recent Google's Webmaster Central Blog Post, Google's John Mueller explained how Google handles new top level domains (TLDs) such as .guru or .how. The nutshell is, there are no TLDs that Google finds preferential to others; they are all treated equally in rankings.

Here are the details Google published on this topic today:

Google does not favor any TLD

Google's systems treat new gTLDs (generic top-level domains) like other gTLDs (like .com & .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in a search.

Googlebot can crawl and index IDN TLDs

Internationalized domain names (IDN) TLDs such as .みんな can be used the same as other TLDs. Google treats the Punycode version of a hostname as being equivalent to the unencoded version, so you don't need to redirect or canonicalize them separately. For the rest of the URL, remember to use UTF-8 for the path and query-string in the URL, when using non-ASCII characters.

A .brand TLD has the same weight as a .com domain

Those TLDs will be treated the same as another gTLDs. They will require the same geotargeting settings and configuration, and they won’t have more weight or influence in the way Google crawls, indexes, or ranks URLs.

Region or city TLDs like .london or .bayern are treated as gTLDs

Even if they look region-specific, Google will treat these TLDs as gTLDs (generic top-level domains). This is consistent with Google's handling of regional TLDs like .eu and .asia. There may be exceptions at some point down the line, as Google sees how they're used in practice.

Country code TLDs will be used for geotargeting

By default, most ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) result in Google using these to geotarget the website (with some exceptions); it tells Google that the website is probably more relevant in the appropriate country. For example, a .de domain is probably more relevant than a .com domain in Germany.

Moving your site to a new TLD is the same as moving your site to a new domain name

Google treats moves to a new TLD the same as any other site move. Domain changes can take time to be processed for search (and outside of search, users expect email addresses to remain valid over a longer period of time), so it's generally best to choose a domain that will fit your long-term needs.

I hope this gives you information on how the new top level domains are handled by Google. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask in Google Webmasters help forum.


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