Can a .ly domain rank in the United States?

[joemaresca]

Hello members. I have a question that I am seeking to confirm whether or not I am on the right track. I am interested in purchasing a .ly domain which is the ccTLD for Libya. The purpose of the .ly domain would be for branding purposes however at the same time I do not want to kill the websites ability to rank in Google.com (United States searches) because of this domain.

Google does not consider .ly to be one of those generic ccTLDs like. io, .cc, .co, etc. that can rank and Bitly has also moved away from the .ly extension to a .com extension. Back in 2011 when there was unrest in Lybia, a few well known sites that utilized the .ly extension had their domains confiscated such as Letter.ly, Advers.ly and I think Bitly may have been on that list too however with the unrest behind us it is possible to purchase a .ly so being able to obtain one is not an issue.

From what I can tell, I should be able to specify in Google Search Console that the website utilizing the .ly extension is a US based website. I can also do this with Google My Business and I will keep the Whois info public so the whois data can been seen as a US based website.

Based on everything I just said do any of you think I will be OK if I were to register and use the .ly domain extension and still be able to rank in Google.com (US Searches). Confirmation would help me sleep better. Thanks in advance everyone and have a great day!!

[Dr-Pete]

Best of luck! Definitely interested in hearing back about how it goes.

[joemaresca]

Thank you for your reply Peter. I have purchased the domain so lets see how it goes. I will respond here with my findings. These are the steps I am taking:

1. Public Whois info with a United States address (my business address).

2. Name servers changed to a US DNS.

3. Setting the location to the US in Search Console.

4. Setting the location to a US address in Google My Business.

5. Use of a web server in the United States (my business address).

According to the registrar that I purchased the domain from roughly 29% of their entire domain client base is in the United States. According to the .ly registrar, US citizens are able to purchase any .ly domain with the exception of 3 character or less .ly's.

[Dr-Pete]

Can a .ly domain rank on Google.com? Sure. Here are many that do:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aly

Do they have a ranking disadvantage? That's a lot tougher question. It's definitely in a gray area. Thanks to Bit.ly and some others, there is some precedent for these domains to be treated as generic, if other signals suggest they are not Libyan domains (geo-location, language, etc.), but there's always more risk for a new site and a chance you'll need to spend more to get the same results.

The political situation is much more worrisome, though, because none of us can predict that. If there's a history of .ly domains being confiscated and if that confiscation was considered legal (even in the short-term), then there's no guarantee that won't happen again. That's a risk we can't calculate in SEO terms. The fact that even Bitly eventually went to bitly.com doesn't bode well.

My gut feeling is that (1) there are no magic domain names, and you're going to have to advertise/market/promote any new domain, and (2) given the geo-political situation there is more than average risk (vs., say, a .co domain or one of the new TLDs). There's a lot I don't know about your situation, but I think your hesitation is warranted.