Does choice of domain suffix effect ranking?

[Advoco]

Hi. I have an English business based in Spain - my customers can be in either Spain or the UK and will be searching in English for an English business. However I chose the suffix .es for my website because .com wasn't available. None of my competitors are .es and most .es sites are Spanish language, for Spanish people. Do I have a problem?

Thanks

[motoxxx]

Yes and no. If you buy all variations of your domain name you can find, you eliminate the possibility of your competition buying them to compete with you or cause you problems. If you purchase the suffixes of .uk, .es, .au, or .ca (depending on where you are doing business) it tells your site visitors that the URL they are about to click on is geographically relevant to them. It also tells the search engines how and where to index you so that you can come up for geographically targeted SERPS. That can be a very big thing for increasing your conversions.

The bad thing is that you have to buy more domains and that costs money!

[subho]

Yeah, rightly so.


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[bermuda]

When you take a look at the status of the top ranking websites in most niches, you would find a mixture of domains and addresses. This means that both the sites which have domains with keywords as well as the companies using domains with no terms are doing pretty well, as long as the sites are powered by lots of quality and authority backlinks added from relevant sources and one more thing is the age of the domains which is extremely important.

[Advoco]

Bermuda - thanks for the opinion. I think your age point is valid, or at least I hope it is because I have been working like mad on my Google rankings for about 4-5 months and the results have been a bit disappointing. When I analyse my competitors I can't see what they are doing better than me and I suspect age may have something to do with it.

[zeeshan_2011]

yes it is right.

[ShopDownLite]

no I think it is not an issue.

[jencruz8787]

That would be okay, as long as you market it well.