Webmasters and marketers need not worry too much that Google’s software will favor one TLD (Top Level Domain) over another. The basic Google mode of operations will favor a gTLD if it is necessary for geo targeting only.
It will be by default that Google will find preference to a gTLD that has geo-targeting potential but all other TLDs will remain the same and treated equally.
The gTLDs like .com and .org will have no advantage nor disadvantage, according to Google. That should alleviate a lot of stress that has been building up recently among marketers and website owners as well as the SEO pros who make their living optimizing these sites. IDN TLDs will be crawlable by the Googlebot as Google treats the Punycode versions of host names as equals to the unencoded versions. No need to redirect or canonicalize them separately. As for the remainder of the URL, you must use UTF-8 for the query string and path in that specific URL, while using non-ASCII characters.
As for .BRAND TLD, these TLDs will not be given any higher or lower status than a .com. You will have to use the same geotargeting settings and set up. No special preferences whatsoever, says Google. The new region/city TLDs will be handled the same although there might be some exceptions sometime in the near future, but Google will have to wait and analyze how these TLDs are used. As for country code TLDs aka cc TLDs, Google states that they will lean towards .uk, and .ae ccTLDs because they are local domain geo important for people looking relevant information regarding that particular country or region. Google has help files for this information.
For marketers and webmasters who wonder if Google will assist in moving their websites and not lose their history and search ranking, Google has a huge site move documentation in their Help Center. They say they’ll treat these moves just like any other site move. It does take time for domain changes to take place so take into account the time needed to process for searches. Of note, email addresses. Searches from the outside will expect that the email addresses will remain valid over a long term basis, so you need to pick a domain that fits those parameters.
Given all that information, the pressure and anxiety should drop among the SEO experts, webmasters and marketers. It was a bit hairy for awhile but now that Google has addressed the issue, people can now get their jobs done and not have to worry about what is on the horizon.
Although Google has assured everyone about their gTLDs, there’s still time involved in regard to what will happen in a year or so from now. If TLDs get abused then Google will try to rein in on the problem and be vigilant to get things made right. Keywords aren’t going to boost your gTLD status and it’s best to follow Google’s SEO guidelines and build sites that are responsible, relevant, non spammy, and provides a valued service to surfers, be mobile friendly, and all around top quality.