I own a website which I want to promote in the Netherlands. For this I bought two domains: mysite.nl and mysite.com, both are registered in the Netherlands. I wonder which domain shall I primary use in link building: mysite.nl or mysite.com? My target audience in the Netherlands and the site is in Dutch. Both sites will have identical content. I can imagine two factors may play here, please correct me if I am wrong: 1. Users may trust local domain (.nl) more than a generic one (.com) 2. Google may prefer local domain (.nl) to a generic (.com) for country- and language-specific rankings. Any hints are welcome!
Careful with the identical content thing, you know how much Google doesn't like that, right? ) I suggest that instead of having two identical sites you just make one a redirect to your main site. I think local domain is better. If your audience is local, the topics/themes you cover are local, and the site is in Dutch — definitely go with the local domain.
Local domain is better in any case, but make sure that whichever one you choose to use, set the other one to redirect to it. Also, if you choose to use the .com one for some reason, go to the Google Webmaster tools and set the target country to Netherlands.
@Radikal, As said by others , if your target audience is in Netherlands , prefer to use .NL domain & have the .COM domain redirected (TLD .COM will always help you to gain mass target or you can target world wide audience at some point of time in future , so don't lose it) But make sure not to have duplicate contents on both the sites , as it might have negative impact in terms of SEO especially with google. Or else one good idea would be is to have .COM website with the english version of your .NL dutch site so you will be having 2 sites for 2 different target audiences & the content is considered to be different based on the language (I assume so) Hope it helps
A local url will be more targeted to to a particular country.So go with the .NL domain And create different content for the other domain.