.wales, .cymru or .co.uk: which domain a Welsh business should use, and what Google does with it

.wales and .cymru are the two Welsh domain endings, run by Nominet, the body behind .co.uk. They opened in phases from September 2014 and went on general sale on 1 March 2015, St David's Day. They mean the same thing in two languages, Google treats both as ordinary endings with no ranking effect, and the right choice is decided by your customers and your email, not by search. Our rule: own the ones that are cheap, pick one as the address, and redirect the rest.

What each one says

A .co.uk says British business and nothing more, and it is what most people type by default when they half-remember an address. A .wales says the business is Welsh, in English, to a customer anywhere. A .cymru says the same in Welsh, and it says something extra to a Welsh speaker: that the business chose the Welsh word. A bilingual shop in Caernarfon that trades under a Welsh name suits .cymru; a plumbing firm in Wrexham that serves Chester suits .co.uk with .wales beside it; a tourism business that wants an English guest to know where they are booking suits .wales.

What Google does with it

Nothing you would notice. Google treats .wales and .cymru as generic endings, like .com, not as a country code. A .wales does not rank a site higher for searches made in Wales, and a .co.uk does not rank it lower. What ties a site to a place in Google's eyes is the address on the page and in the structured data, the towns named in the content, and the Google Business Profile. A business in Aberystwyth on a .com with the address on every page is more local to Google than one on a .cymru with no address at all.

The same goes for language. The Welsh version of a site is not made by a .cymru; it is made by Welsh pages with hreflang tags that say which language each page is in. A .cymru site in English is an English site, and a .co.uk with a /cy/ section is bilingual.

Email, the phone and memory

The domain is also the email address, and the email address is said aloud on the phone several times a day. "Dafydd at dafyddjones dot cymru" needs spelling for a customer in Birmingham; "dot co dot uk" does not. That is the argument for .co.uk for a business whose customers are outside Wales, and it is the argument for .cymru for a business whose customers are Welsh speakers, who will spell it without thinking. A .wales sits between the two: understood everywhere, and worth a second's explanation on the phone.

The practical rule

Register the endings you can, while they are cheap and before someone else does; a competitor holding your name on .wales is an avoidable nuisance. Choose one as the address the site lives at, put that one on the van and the invoices, and redirect the others to it permanently, page for page, so a customer who types the wrong ending lands in the right place. Never run two endings as two live sites: Google sees two copies of every page and the site competes with itself.

Moving an existing site to a new ending

A business that has been on .co.uk for years and wants to move to .wales can, and should do it with a redesign rather than on its own, because the move is the same job as a redesign's redirect map: every old address redirected to its new twin, the Google Business Profile updated the same day, the email moved with the domain and tested. Done properly the rankings follow within weeks. Done as a quick switch at the registrar, with no redirects, the site starts again from nothing. If the only reason to move is the ending, the honest advice is usually to keep the old address and add the new one as a redirect.

What we do on our own sites: the address customers know, the other endings registered and redirected, the language in the pages and not in the domain.