Does Google care about country domain extensions? If a .com has a link pointing to a .ca website, is that link worth as much as it would be to a .com - all other things equal?
In terms of overall value, Google couldn’t care less about what TLD you use – whether you use .com, .org, .gov, .ca, .tv or anything else. The value of the link depends on the value of the website itself, but what type of domain it’s on isn’t a factor.
In terms of relevance, if your site is aimed at a Canadian audience then links from sites in/about Canada (whether they’ve got a .com or .ca address) are likely to be worth more than sites elsewhere around the globe.
When it comes to backlink, the only thing that matters is the relavancy of the page.
You may get extra credit if you are targeting UK audience and getting backlinks from website with extension .co.uk.
There is nothing to do any top level domain, whether your backlinks are coming from a .com website or .ca or a .us website. The thing that matter is relevancy and Page Rank. I have included page rank because, you will get the juice if they have good page rank. What if they have 0 page rank, sorry… you will not get link juice.
There seems to be inconsistent advice on here. The TLD is important when optimising for geographic regions, such as Canada, Australia, UK etc. If you have a website in Canada then .ca links will hold more relevance than .co.uk or .com.au links of the same quality.
Also remember that .com isn’t America, .us is America.
Domain does not matter in my opinion because all that matter is backlink of that site. So in my view if you are promoting your website you have to deal with relevancy of the content. Dot com is very popular and demand so we think that it is very important.
I don’t see anything inconsistent.
Google won’t consider a site to be intrinsically better just because of the TLD it uses.
Google will often consider a local site to be more relevant than an international site or a site that’s local somewhere else.
Generic, non-country specific domains such as .com or .org might be international sites, or they might be local sites that have simply chosen to register an international domain. I know of plenty of sites that are only aimed at a UK audience that use .com or .org addresses rather than any .uk format. Google will look at a whole range of factors as well as the TLD when trying to establish the locality of a site – including hosting arrangements, language, content, keywords, addresses, other inbound and outbound links – so it will usually be able to tell whether a site is aimed at a particular country or region, regardless of what TLD it uses.
I don’t think you’ve understood what I’ve said. I didn’t say a site is better because of the TLD, I said more relevant. I also didn’t say that .ca sites were better than .com sites when linking to a Canadian website, I said:
This means links from sites within your own country, using links with a TLD from within your country or websites that are generally relevant to your country will be better for optimising for geographic regions.
The advice for 2gbhost for example was incorrect; that is where the inconsistency comes in.