My wife wants to start a new website and I want it to focus on Australia traffic (hence the .com.au), however, I would like to get some international traffic as well. So does having an international domain extension make it harder to rank well on google.com?
If your focus is on certain location you should get domain for that location, if any. I think it would rather help you rank better on country specific searches.
Get the .com.au if your target market is Australia. You can still rank well in google.com with a ccTLD.
yup yup very good choice... The locals trust this kind of thing way more even if they are just beginning with computers
.com's are the best in Googles eyes but there are so many other factors involved. Like content and backlinks.
Lies. Go for the .com.au if you want easy google.com.au rankings, .com if you are targeting the global market (which you already said is only your secondary objective) so go for the .com.au. I am doing the same thing, starting a company (ecommerce) targeting Australians.
As far as I am aware, Google do not penalize ccTLD's (or any TLD) in searches, but can favor/boost a ccTLD in local search. (gTLD's miss out on this favor/boost unless they are geo targeted) In the same way you can get a .com to rank #1 in Australia, you can get a .com.au to rank #1 in Brasil, Canada, New Zealand etc. Cheers James
one of my main sites is .com.au and it ranks very well for its keywords and i get a lot of international inquiries