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I am starting an e-commerce website for local customers and the .com I want for the website has been taken (however the .in is available).

I want to know whether it is going to affect my SEO rankings or not if I use .in.

I want to expand the website for other countries too in the future.

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  • See this and this related question regarding targeting .in internationally in the future.
    – dan ♦
    Mar 21, 2019 at 8:34

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If you are planning to do an overseas business, I would suggest you go for .com instead of a country level domain extension which is .in in your case. I think .in is for India so, this domain extension will work wonders for you if you are trying to rank a website in India.

Here what you can do

  1. Get a .com extension domain name
  2. Create websites for different countries in sub-directories like example.com/fr, example.com/uk and so on
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  • So is it good to make it .in for business in India?
    – John Doe
    Mar 21, 2019 at 7:48
  • Yes, .in is good for business within India. Google automatically geo-targets .in domain to India which means they are more relevant to users in India. However, there is no way to get them to show up in search results for people in other countries.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Mar 21, 2019 at 10:40
  • Yes, If you are initiating your business in India It would be better you can go with .in but, keep in mind if you are planning to expand this in next 2-3 years to other countries then go for a .com domain name
    – P082
    Mar 22, 2019 at 8:51
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The short answer, i found, is a point of view from an official Google source:

".. It’s worth noting that in the eyes of Google and other search engines, all TLDs are equal.."

source: https://domains.google/learn/traditional-vs-new-domain-endings/

It says, technically the chosen domain ending doesn't affecting your website's SEO ranking.

You still may worth to do research about what other possible other (global) TLD-s might be proper for your website / project / business. All major domain providers' websites offering suggestions and lists of hundreds of available TLDs, worth to check through their lists and make your own Top 5-10 most relevant alternative TLD choices for your project before purchasing the winning one.

It may affect rather mental ways how the people perceive and remember your website's domain. More common TLD-s are usually statistically performing somewhat better because people might try to type them at the end of a website which they are not sure about it's exact TLD domain ending, etc. This might bring some extra visitor traffic compared to the less common TLDs.

However: it's worth to research it thoroughly, because some TLDs are regarded as more spammy and harmful than others. For example many major SEO softwares, backlink tools are measuring a linking website's possible quality and 'spam-factor' also based on what TLD it using. Some TLD-s are more popular for spam sites, etc. So useful to check some negative TLD top lists about what surely not to choose.. (unless you plan to start some shady business which we honestly wish you don't :)

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