Does Google treat .co as a generic TLD?
Matt's answer:
Today’s question comes from Costa Rica. Andres wants to know, there has been a lot of hype about the .co TLDs– that’s Colombia– and there are many people posting that Google will accept them as the new .com, although it’s the TLD for Colombia. Will Google treat the .co as generic, like .com or .net, or as a local TLD, that is like a country TLD? Good question. And the answer is that there have been enough people using .co around the world that we’re not treating as if it is specific to Colombia. So at least you do have the ability within Google Webmaster Tools to say, for my .co, C-O, this is really about this country or that country. So Colombia has sort of decided to sell those domains very broadly around the world. And so if you go in Webmaster Tools, even though it’s a country domain, you do have the ability to do geotargeting within the Webmaster console to sort of say, even though it ends with angel.co or something like that, this is actually related to the United States. Hope that helps.
by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team
FACEBOOK
TWITTER