Are country-specific TLDs useful?

Last night, I sent an email to my newsletter subscribers about an offer that domain registrar EuroDNS was running: any US, Canadian or European resident could register up to 20 domains in the “.be” top-level domain (TLD) for free. (The offer's now over, so don't bother trying… You had to be quick on the draw, and I think they had a flood of last-minute registrations…) But this leads us directly to today's discussion about country-specific TLDs. Are these TLDs useful?

As anyone who's read my book knows, each geographic region in the world has been assigned a two-letter top-level domain, known simply as a “country-code TLD” or ccTLD. Thus Canada gets .ca, France gets .fr, Belgium .be, Germany .de, and so on. The administration of each ccTLD is left up to the government of the region. Many delegate it to third-party registrars in return for a share of the proceeds. Many have a residency requirement — you can't register a .ca domain unless you're a Canadian resident or company (see here for the full rules) for example.

There's no doubt that the “.com” domain is the most powerful domain today. It's where most people go to register their domains. You say “dot com” and people instantly know what you mean. So given the choice between registering “domain.com” and “domain.ca”, the “.com” variant almost always has the edge because:

• People understand what it means
• There's a global flavor to it — it's not tied to any specific country/region/language
• It's cheaper — often much, much cheaper
• People implicitly tack on a “.com” when they hear a domain name

Unfortunately, finding a good domain name in the .com registry is extremely hard these days. Especially if you're looking for a keyword-based domain name instead of building a brand. (There are two different approaches to choosing domain names: one is to go for generic terms, one is to build a brand. The former favors random search traffic, the latter favors standing out from the crowd.) So some registrants end up registering their domain in a ccTLD instead. But this can be problematic, because chances are that people looking for your site will end up finding the “.com” version instead. So think carefully about substituting a ccTLD when you really want a .com domain.

That said, ccTLDs are useful for many sites. A ccTLD implies a cultural, geographic or linguistic association that may be useful to you. If your site is in French, for example, anyone seeing a .fr, .be or .ca address will not be surprised to come across French content. In fact, for .fr they'll probably expect it. If you're targeting a specific locale (geek talk for a country/region/culture/language) then a ccTLD may make a lot more sense than the generic .com.

Of course, there's nothing to say that you can't use both types of domains. For example, you could register a ccTLD and place translated content on it while having your English content on a .com domain. If you're looking to monetize content via AdSense, this is a better approach than having your web server return different content for the same page based on what the user's browser says it prefers — because the ads aren't as well-targeted as they could be. Always put your translated content on different pages to ensure that the AdSense crawler sees it in all its translated glory.

I'd love to hear about any positive or negative experiences you've had with ccTLDs, so drop me a note…

Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and the new e-book Uncommon AdSense.

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