My knowledge of Russian in only very basic, but I am about to have a microsite translated into that language. Can I order a domain name in Cyrillic? If not how do I transliterate my domain into Russian? - E.g. if my site is about cars, should the domain name ideally be cars.ru (in English) or avtomobili.ru? When I type автомобили into Google, I find only sites whose domain name is in Latin script, e.g. carsguru.net, automobili.ru, mobile.bg, auto.ru etc. Are there rules about transliterating from Cyrillic to Latin? automobili.ru or avtomobili.ru?
Absolutely you can buy Russian IDNs in Cyrillics!! But keep in mind all the good Russian names have been gone for a while now & good names sell for good money too.
Thanks. Would you say that the .ru extension is vital if I aim at Russian speakers, or will a .com or .co work equally well?
If you promote your site (or products) to the russian market, the .ru domain will be better for Yandex and russian Google.
Yes, you can order a domain in Cyrillic. This domain is .рф (РФ means Russian Federation) and it appeared on 2010 but still not so popular such .ru You can register РФ domain from 3$ with one of resellers and up to 20$ if you deal with registrar directly. But using the РФ domain is uncomfortably even in Russia. You can register beautiful name автомобили.рф but if your friend live in Germany, for example, and not have keyboard with cyrillic letters, he should be write the terrible URL xn--80acczarepb1b.xn--p1ai instead. You can see it youself by typing both URL addresses in your browser What's about automobili.ru or avtomobili.ru - the second is correctly but both of them would be well-reading by Russians.
I think .com domains work equally well as .ru I know that people talk about .ru domain better for yandex etc. but if you have good useful site .com domains are good too.
It's true but it's not easy to get a good .com name. And the price of .com is about $10. The price of .ru is about $3. It matters if you need 100 or 200 domain names.
.ru seems like a logical choice indeed. However my current registrars Namecheap and Name.com don't seem to offer that tld. Which registrar (accepting Paypal) do you recommend?
The correct answer is avtomobili.ru, in Cyrillic domain name it would sound like автомобили.рф I am not sure about the future of Cyrillic domains, so I would recommend you to use latin domains with russian pronunciation. If you need any help on this, PM me.
Both is good You can order your domain name in cyrillic. It will be: автомобили.рф You can register this domain with REG.RU: http://www.reg.com/