Google Evens The Playing Field: .CO Geo-Targeting Confirmed!

I thought this headline might get your attention. As usual Domain Name Wire has beat me to a great story 🙂 I only kid – Andrew is an awesome guy and does an excellent job of breaking news! DNW is a blog I’ve been reading everyday for three years…there’s very few blogs I can say that about! This story dovetails perfectly on a post I wrote yesterday, Why People Love To Hate .CO…And Why I Love .CO!

I got a lot of comments from people with their FEARS about .CO. There is nothing wrong with being scared – but part of taking a risk means believing in something and knowing that you’re taking a risk. For me, my #1 concern was how Google would treat .CO. If they kept it as a ccTLD like .ie, .fr and many other ccTLDs then it would be harder to rank in Google US.

Well the news this morning made my day…and here it is straight from Google themselves!

While the .co domain is still assigned to Colombia at the moment, a Google spokesperson said that would soon change. “We will rank .co domains appropriately if the content is globally targeted. Webmasters will soon have the functionality to be able to specify this by using the geotargeting options in Google Webmaster Tools. (Google to Treat .Co as International Domain – Domain Name Wire)

This means that .CO domains will have the same geo-targeting options that .com domains have!

Even Google themselves says within Webmaster Tools that only neutral top-level domains like .com and .org can use geo-targeting. Since .CO is now in there that puts it on par with a .com or .org domain.

This has been my #1 hesitation with .CO and I think the top objection I’ve heard so far. With that out of the way I think that a lot of people got some great domains this week and I’m looking forward to seeing some .CO sites on the first page of Google! I’m working on one of mine now so stay-tuned – I want to be one of the first 100 .CO sites on the Internet 🙂

As always I encourage you to share your opinion! Comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton