I understand the need for a .com as it is the most powerful when wanting to appear in Google.com, and if your website is in french a .fr will help that site to rank for french in Google.fr, i also understand a .cn site in chinese will help your chinese rankings in Google.cn or Baidu........ BUT what is .la all about? Google.la and WIKI reckon the .LA domain is actually a ccTLD (country code top level domain) and the Internet country code for Laos. However I look at http://www.la/ and they reckon it is for the City of LA What use is the .la unless you are trying to get to the top of Google.la in Laos? Please help!
Actually, nobody has been able to prove that. Your domain ending doesn't matter, it's the content. Having a French site helps you rank on google.fr, a mandarin one google.cn etc.
You have answered yourself there. If people in the UK are targeting people in the same place then obviously they'll go for Google UK, pretty much the same with Google.la and the rest.
Other places use the extention as "part of he domain name". rorr.im for example, is a mirror site (pretty clever eh?). This has the tendency to catch on with the community.
if you cant get the kw in .com, getting it in other regional extension can make all the difference. it is either for geo targeting or for seo reason
ofcourse wherever and whatever your site is all about and where it came from google will detect it automatically like what Grimm said.
After a lot of research into the subject we believe that people are being Dotconned by Libbla or libb.la or in fact a company called Centralnic. They are selling what we believe either to be a sub domain of their website (they do own this) www.la or a Laos domain name (x.la). Here is a guardian article on the company who has sold or is reselling you these names: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2000/sep/10/money.efinance This company is either a reseller for or is actually the company called ‘centralnic’ who is reselling Laos webnames conning you into thinking they are from LA. You can see in the footer of www.la that it is powered by Centralnic. Not surprising really a British firm in Moorgate cloaking as a USA registrar. Here is a forum talking about it: http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?t=133639 And here is the IANA Report on Redelegation of the .la Top-Level Domain: http://www.iana.org/reports/2002/la-report-11dec02.html 99% of sites with .la appear to be in thai Centralnic have also bought uk.com and are selling sub domains like harrods.uk.com just like you could sell worldcup.yoursite.com If you are keen on buying up webnames – use an accredited registrar http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/accredited-list.html and make sure the names are correct http://www.whois365.com/en/listtld/north-america In the meantime it looks like you might be able to cancel if you have already bought a name but i doubt it: “3. Cancellations, Transfers, and Changes. We will cancel, transfer or otherwise make changes to domain name registrations under the following circumstances: a. subject to the provisions of Paragraph 8, our receipt of written or appropriate electronic instructions from you or your authorized agent to take such action;â€
LA has done a deal with Laos to sell its names for LA http://icannwiki.org/Joe_Alagna This is ridiculous. Anyhow for SEO it will not help anyone get to the top of Google in LA for anything so is only useful for maybe the image. Voila!
It is a properly optimized website will also make it easy for your visitors to navigate their way around.