Does Google love certain country TLD's more than others?

Loads of people say yes and loads of people say no.

The ones that seem to be loved more (like .co.uk).. is it because the people behind them are investing more in their SEO? Is it because sites having certain TLD's tend to get more respect from other sites and therefore they tend to get more links?

When it comes to local SERPs, the specific local ccTLD will always be favoured vs. other TLDs. So in essence you're right - but it depends which local version of Google you are using
There are some markets which cross-over, a good example being The Netherlands & Belgium. If you search in Google.be in Dutch you will get an enormous amount of .nl (Netherlands) results. This has nothing to do with them being favoured, it's more a matter of the Belgian market being so small in comparison that it's a natural occurance to have relevant pages from The Netherlands appear in the SERPs.
Same applies in similar conditions in other markets. In theory though, a well optimised and popular .be domain in identical conditions would outrank a .nl one in the Belgian SERPs.

Sorry, I forgot to say that I was talking about google.com

Alex,

The results you get in Google.com will depend on where you are searching from - in effect they will be slightly biased towards the local TLD of the country you search from. If you search from the UK, you will see stronger .co.uk results in 'the web' than if you were search the same way but based in the US.

Hi Alex,
I just wanted to ad that your results will also vary depending on the browser you are using. The "browser effect" is accentuated in a multi-lingual environment, for instance take me - I work most of the time with Italian websites but all my tools are in English: When I run search engine queries (in Italian) off english versions of browsers, the results differ when compared to the regional versions of the browser, and on top of that different browsers will offer different SERPs ... in a nutshell (I know I might be side-tracking here) you are never quite sure when or where or whom your website is being read ... getting more and more FUN !!

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

Thanks for your answers. You pointed out some details that I definitely wasn't taking into account.

So let's think of this example

Say there is a guy in Colombia (spanish speaking country), with his browser configured in chinese.
He is using google.com, searching for a term in polish.
There are 2 sites that are targetting that term.
Both are written in polish, have the same meta tags for polish and are hosted in Poland. They have exactly the same domain name, except for the extension. Site A is blablabla.co.uk and site B is blablabla.co.in. Let's assume that the links they have are more or less the same.

Loads of people on the internet would say Google.com will favour site A. Of course, many of them are actually in the UK, so that might be the source of the misunderstanding like Andy pointed out.

But sometimes I get the feeling that in the case of our colombian friend that I just made up, google would still favour site A. So I started to wonder whether it's true that G will consider a .UK site more reliable than an .IN site, or it's just that UK people have more money to spend on stuff so generally they tend to have better SEO, therefore giving the wrong impression that google is favouring site A when in reality site A wins because it tends to have better SEO.

And, sorry for this SAD SAD SAD post!

Alex,
don't look at the tree, concentrate on the forest ! you know that the domain name is ONE of many factors, and I wouldn't say that it is a fundamental one either - getting a website on the 1st page of the Search Engines gets harder day after day and it requires hard (on site and offsite) work so go for it !

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

Google uses IP Delivery, Geo targeting and other technologies to retrieve queries based on location and language variables. Nonetheless, if you isolate all the variables for ranking (server location, header language, personalized search, inlinks, etc.) except the ccTLD, there is a chance that Google might prefer an English-associated ccTLD like .co.uk over a .co.in.

The aforementioned statement is based on the fact that for Google, English is the only non-foreign language. And since a .co.uk is predominantly for English speakers and associated with the languae, then the that ccTLD might have some weight in the algos. However, this does not meant the their results will be polluted with low quality pages if all things are equal, unless of course, there is no much information.

thanks for helpful post