I’ve been mentioning alot of cool new TLD’s around here – however there’s been a question burning in the back of my mind about all these new domain names for a while now: How does Google plan to treat all of these new domain names? Will Google automatically geo-target a .NYC domain name to New York residents? As it turns out I wasn’t the only one wondering this as sakeoftruth asked the same question on the Google Webmaster Forums.
Google’s John Mueller responded stating that Google is currently treating new TLD’s as generic top-level domains; meaning a .guru domain name is viewed by Google much in the same way a .com or a .net domain name would be.
… we currently treat the new TLDs as gTLDs, even if they sound like they may be region-specific (eg .berlin). If, over time, our analysis shows that they’re clearly limited to only websites from those regions, that might be worth reconsidering. In the meantime, you should be able to set geotargeting manually for these TLDs.