I'm facing a bit of a dilemma. My site www.flippers.be exists for a few years now. It was started with content about pinball in belgium, but now extended to more pinball information that the whole world can benefit (game reviews, repair info, ..) It's quite known by people in the specific niche, and I invested a bit in the domainname (business cards, sweaters with logo on, ..) Now I want to optimise my site to rank a bit higher in the search results for more general search terms that are pinball and/or arcade related. (ie pinball repair, pinball sales, pinball machine, ..) However when I check with the serps rank checker tool at http://link.ezer.com/tools/google_serps_rank_checker.asp I notice my site scores bad for most search terms.. only for some very specific keywords I get in the top 100. Sometimes only google.be and google.nl some pages come up but at google.com and other countries - it can be very different: not in 100 but in top10 on google.be Sites that do show up on google.com aren't always better sites imo, but they usually seem to have a pinball.com related domain name. Therefor I start to doubt about my .be domainname, if it doesn't restrict me too much. I believe that if my site content was on a .com domainname, it would rank (much) higher. Too bad I didn't know this a few years ago when I registered the domainname. Problem is all 'good' pinball-related domainnames are taken, so if I register a .com name I will have to be creative to find a free domain and it will not be something people type in themselves. What would you do ? My options as I see them: 1. Optimise the .be site as much as possible and just live with it ? Do I overestimate the .com influence over .be ? 2. Register a new .com domainname and move everything ? 3. Register a .com and move some parts of my site and link to them from the .be site ? My site is in dutch and english so I could always only move the english pages and leave the dutch pages at the .be site ?
I would recommend 2 choices even though the .be as opposed to the .com should not be an influence on ranking as much as unique content and building back links to the domain would be. Register the .com and add it as a parked domain under the .de domain. All traffic for the .com will see the exact same site on the .de Second option would be to split the 2 languages and place the english on the .com and leave the dutch on the .de domain. Link both sites to one another. Although with this option you now have 2 domains and sites requireing optimization rather then just one.