Since im not based in the U.S im just wondering how most americans get their search results if you did a general web search on google, ie not U.S specific. I would imagine generally speaking you would get .com .net .org .co.uk and if sufficiently indexed com.au?
I spend a lot of time searching and I rarely see a .com.au site in the search results, so it certainly doesn't happen often. To test it out, I just did a Google search on "Nokia." Of the first 100 results, there was one .mobi, two .us, one .edu and a small number of .net and .org (I didn't count those two TLDs but I'd say there were less than 10 combined). Not a single .au of any stripe made the top 100. I then searched "Melbourne zoo". The first result was - no surprise - the zoo's official website which was a .org.au. and there were two .com.au results in the top ten. Of the top 50 results, a total of 17 had a .au TLD (mostly .com.au but a smattering of .net and .edu in the mix).
Good post. I'd have to agree. In my experience with SE's, I have not come across many .com.au results on page1-3, which is usually as far as I go. I suppose though, it would depend on what one were searching for. Melbourne Zoo or Nokia? That said, it seems the opinion of many domainers that the extension is inconsequential to SE indexing. .
They do come up on search results sometimes, it is all baed on where the site is hosted as most search engines allocate the site/page based on the ip/country of origin. if you live in Canada for example you will get different results for the same keywords. you might try a search engine over a proxy of a country to see the search results and how the differ! Good Luck
All good info, thx guys. Was just a thought. There are still some good .com.au domains available, quite a few, off course you need to have a matching business name or show a solid connection to the domain your after under the rules, but its possible to pick them up. If you bought a .com.au, hosted it on U.S servers, and had content that was relevant to everyone, not just aussies....was thinking it might be viable.
yea very rarely, and its usually a sub domain rather than an extension, for example au.youtube.com rather than youtube.com.au