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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

This is a complicated solution that will produce many false positives. The simpler solution would be to just give each customer a box in Webmaster Tools where they could select whether they wanted their domain (wherever that is) to be targeted generically.

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False positives? Please correct me if I'm wrong but I can't find a single .io site that is actually intended just for residents of the British Indian Ocean Territories.

Edit: Checking the NIC rules, actual IO residents with servers in the territory can use the reserved third level domains like foo.com.io. I still can't find any that actually exist.

That's a problem with users of .io domains, not with the system. Every time I see a .is domain that is just from some ego-driven developer (mygreatname.is or similar) I cringe, just like when I saw nyan.cat (cat is the top-level domain for Catalan and Catalonia and supposedly has stringent conditions for granting its use)

For those who had to look it up "nyan" is the sound a cat makes in Japanese aka "meow" in English.

Well, the Nyan Cat was a meme hit something like 2 or 3 years ago. Reddit gets you this stupid knowledge ;)

I actually learned of Nyan Cat from all the silly Nyan Cat hacks that showed up on HN.

Nyan.cat at least used to have an information page explaining their use of .cat; having a version of your content in Catalan (which they still do) is apparently sufficient.

Last time I checked in addition to having your content in Catalan, you had to do business or have some kind of "grounded" relation with Catalonia or the Catalan language.

Was one of the reasons I didn't buy Fatou.cat as a domain for my cat's blog (left it at tumblr), or thefancypuffin.cat for our handmade shoemaking business (in addition to the larger exposure of .com domains, of course)

You're right, I conflated it with ".li", from this video, where Matt Cutts talks about the issue:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Q...

I found a couple: http://www.brinks.io/en/ and a whole bunch of subdomains under Mauritius.io https://www.google.com/#output=search&q=site:mauritius.i...

Indeed there is no indigenous population and hasn't been since 1966 [1]. It's nothing but a strategically well-placed airbase with a few thousand personal and contractors.

.io is clearly a gccTLD. The TLD administration and commissioner in charge of 'the government' reside in the UK.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory#...

There is a population that would like to return home...

True. And the "marine reserve" shenanigans are disgraceful.

Sorry if I'm being dense - but I can already do this in GWT. I run jobboard.io and am able to set US as the GEO Target for that domain.

Oh that's odd, can anyone else confirm?

Happy to post a screenshot, but wonder if it is a violation of Google T&C?

I think this is the first time I've seen anyone whose question could be answered by RTFAing, but... RTFA.

http://clay.io/blog/an-appeal-to-google-make-io-a-gcctld/

> “If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools, we’ll rely largely on the site’s country domain”

"If no information is entered in Webmaster Tools" -> "It's possible to enter information into Webmaster Tools"

He later says:

> Even if ccTLDs and gccTLDs were treated exactly the same in terms of ranking, Google does not take into account the Geographic target set in Webmaster Tools. Own a “.io” domain and want to target towards US searchers? It doesn’t work.

With the evidence being that socket.io is only a 19th in a search for WebSockets, which I think so sorta shaky, but there you go.

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