I am curious if it is better (in the eyes of the engines) if your domain has a .com .net .org .biz .ws or .info at the end. I realize .com is best for helping your visitors remeber your domain, but does it make a difference to the search engines. Anyone have any solid experience with this?
The only one of that list I'm not sure about is the .ws - the others seem to rank well for sites across the board as long as other "rules of the road" are observed i.e. content, optimization, links, etc. Of course, they are other domain extension that are becoming "bad real estate" like .tk, but from the list you provided they all seem capable of getting results - again, I'm not sure about the .ws though.
If you have a regional site it matters big time. If you have a .be site it wil rank high in google.be but not in google.com. Quite a lot of discussion is saying that .edu, .gov domains and like military domains get higher rankings.
basically, .edu and .gov sites are considered "authority sites" and thus are given a boost. If you can get a link to one of them, then you'll notice a massive surge in your site's rankings. However, it's a BITCH to get a link out of them. For an example, there's some little rule that in order to have a .edu site, you aren't allowed to link to ecommerce sites (or something like that)
SarahK - that's a very sharp looking site, best of luck with it. Luckily, .ws doesn't seem to have gotten a bad rap like other country code TLD extension, so hopefully your site will kick butt
Not necessarily true. First, if you optimize properly, you can rank high bith in google.com and in a regional Google. Second, you do NOT need a regional domain to rank well in a regional Google - you need ONE of the following: 1. EITHER a regional domain name (.be, .co.uk, .ca, .de, etc.), OR 2. hosting in the region in question But of course those are restricted domains so you and I and the OP can't get one.
You don't think there's another way around this? I currently focus on working locally but I have a client who wants help selling products internationally. Is it simply impossible to get a .com hosted in the US to show up on...let's say Google Mexico...even if you offer a targeted subdomain in Spanish? (ie: mx.mysite.com). I just started researching this and haven't come across anything conclusive myself.
My reading of it is that you'd be best advised to obtain a regional domain name and use that domain to publish the Spanish version rather than a subdomain.
Okay...just dug up an interesting thread on the High Rankings forum (I don't read that board too often). Supposedly the recommended tactic is to purchase a regional domain and park it so it points to your main domain (parked, NOT redirect). For instance....mysite.be is parked and points to mysite.com. If I have a subdomain or subfolder with a different language for that region I can also point the domain to that. The second step is to build up a few backlinks from regional directories which point to the regional domain. So if I was targeting Mexico I would get a regional domain, park it on my hosting account, have it pointed to a Spanish language subdomain, and then submit the new domain to some regional targeted directories with a Mexico domain suffix. Supposedly you can also link to the regional domain within your currently indexed site and that will also get picked up. Here's a related article... http://www.mcanerin.com/articles/localsearch01.htm
I wondered about that although I'd be inclined to point it to a subdomain I think. I wasn't sure what Google would do with that "redirect" though (actually domain forwarding). I have a domain I haven't yet used but bought (to protect it) about 9-10 months ago. It's parked and points to one of my main domains. Google doesn't rank it anywhere. I admit I haven't really promoted it though - haven't decided yet what I want to do with it.
There is a difference between parking a domain and doing redirect or refresh. It's pretty grey but it's there. If you have two domains and one is parked on the other they are both still valid, whereas when you use a redirect you're basically telling the spiders that the url in the link is dead. I am off to start testing this strategy!
To the best of my knowledge from all research Ive done no Top Level Domain name will rank better then another based on the extension alone. I have heard quite a few SEO experts mention this to be the case.