Does Google penalize sites on "commercial" country code domains such as .me or .tv?
There are no penalties or preferences given for TLDs in google.com
. All TLDs are treated equally in a google.com
web search.
However, TLDs do affect your search results for country specific searches. For example, a .me
or .tv
domain will not rank as well as a .us
website in a google.us
web search. Also, a .co.uk
site will rank better then a .us
site in a google.co.uk
search. This is because country specific searches give precedence to local websites.
So if you are targeting a specific country or region, try to use the TLD for that country or region. If not then the TLD does not make a difference.
In short: no, Google does not penalize .me
or .tv
sites by default.
Google would generally treat .me
and .tv
domains the same as .com
. They're all seen as generic TLDs (gTLDs), so they are not country-specific by default (technically, .me
and .tv
are ccTLDs, but since they're used so widely, Google treats them as gTLDs).
.co.uk
is a bit different - it's a ccTLD, so it's country-specific. For those, it's possible that they are shown a bit higher in the local search results in the UK. However, you can achieve the same effect by using Google Webmaster Tools' geotargeting feature. More on that is at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html.
For other search engines, it's probable that .me
& .tv
are also seen as gTLDs, but I'm not 100% certain (these things can change over time). Also, in general, unless you can specify geotargeting with them, they will use the server's location for geotargeting of gTLDs - so if you have a .com
website hosted in the UK, it's probable that they will use that as a signal that you are trying to target the UK.