I tried searching for this topic and couldn't find anything on it. If there is a topic already on this, please forgive me. I am about to open some new sites and am looking for domains. I really want to have the keywords for the site in the domain, but may be forced to register non-TLD's to get the keywords in my domain name. For example. I really wanted 'motorcycleforums' in my domain. Motorcycleforums.com was already taken, so I registered motorcycleforums.us. All other factors aside, will Google give higher preference to the .com domain and less to the .us?
My experience is that google does give preference to top tlds. For example when I registered for a .org domain (.com and .net werent available), even though my site was up and running, the .com domain was on top for some time when i searched for my domain name (just the name without .xxxx).
It's generally accepted that the type of TLD does not matter when it comes to serps, unless it's a region specific TLD (like .co.uk, which may rank better on that side of the world). When it comes to users, however, most assume .com and that's where potentially the type in traffic and sometimes backlinks will be lost by using something else.
Man, small world! I'm just a few miles from you! Do you have any sorta data or an article on a trusted site to back up the claim that type of TLD doesn't matter? I thought that was the case, but I couldn't confirm it anywhere. Mike
Different General TLDs don't have different weight in search engines. Websites in all sorts of gtlds show up in the top ten of results for lots of queries. As an example try searching for "pagerank checker" . The first result will be a .info site. However country code tlds like .us or .pk have more weight in queries that are about web sites in the relevant country. They may also have less weight in queries not limited to specific geographical regions i.e. general search "the web" queries.