uk.com Vs .co.uk for organic results

[TinkyWinky]

Okay - i have a client that is wanting to go down the route of the uk.com domains as a way of securing a slightly better domain in a tough sector - finance!!

e.g. www.finance/uk/com

Anyone have any hard and fast proof of the pro's and con's of this for organic ranking.

Obviously the hardwork is in the link building - but would an exact match on a big term be treated the same as if it was a .co.uk, given the domains are actually canonicals in effect?

From previous anecdotal evidence i have not seen or heard of too many successful high ranking uk.com's but would happily be proved wrong to keep the client happy. I realise the yearly fee is £36 or whatever so a lot more expensive, but they have found a more generic version that has search terms of 100k + ... so that is not an issue.

There are no .co.uk / .org.uk variants the client is happy with that's all and she 'doesn't like' .me.uk

Keen to find out anyone's thoughts and experience on this....
TW

 

[pugyrob]

not sure but get her to like me.uk if i was you as they are bankers, i really dont think that people would be put off by it in finance they dont tend to scrutnize so much, if shes after branding it then maybe me.uk is out.

rob

 

[James]

All else being equal I would say the .uk.com would probably affect the resale value of the business, simply due to perceived value of the extension, so maybe it would be better to go for a brandable .co.uk if you can't afford a generic.

I can see why you may want a search term domain if you will be relying on search traffic, but I haven't seen too many high ranking .uk.com sites. If anyone else has some examples it would be good to see them. It is possible that G doesn't like uk.com as much as other TLDs, and if so this could be down to the fact that any domain registered would really just be a subdomain of uk.com.

I believe recently G brought in a rule to allow a maximum of two subdomains per indexed site. This doesn't appear to apply to uk.com (and I'm not sure if this still applies in general anyway) however there may still be some indexing restrictions in place.

 

[ScottJ]

They brought in a max of 2 subdomains for any one search term in the organics James as far as I am aware, so you could have hundreds/thousands of subdomains and all indexed and all ranking, but for the search term 'finance' you could have a max of 2 showing in the top 10.

As far as .uk.com if you want an example of a company using one check Avon (cosmetics)

I wouldn't use a uk.com though and would agree with James that I'd prefer a brandable .co.uk, Google does give an emphasis to keyword domain, they also give an emphasis towards .co.uk if your looking for Google.co.uk rankings, I'd opt for .co.uk brandable if it were my choice.

 

[yesterday]

As far as parking them is concerned. Google *hate* .uk.coms they disabled just about all of mine one after the other in namedrive for no good reason.

I don't know if that's reflected out in the real world.

yesterday

 

[rob]

Its worth looking up the fate of .web.com .... recently all sites being killed off as the domain has a new owner.

Shows the perils of subdomains 'domains'

 

[TinkyWinky]

Cheers guys - i thought as much.

the resale value of the business

Don't she has thought that far ahead

I'd agree on the preference for exact matching .co.uk's where applicable or a slightly more obtuse but related name.

Throwing another thing in - what about a .org.uk exact match if that was free....? I have seen a few more of those appearing reaonsably high up the serps.... although not in finance but that is probably due to copmpetition...!

Cheers
TW