Hello,
       I have recently bought two domain names:
www.tv-satellite.us
www.dishnetwork-tv.us
but now i think i have made a mistake.
Is it possible that the search engines give more weight to the dotcom Tld's,
instead of other Tld's?
brgds
babici

Hi there,

It depends on whether someone is making a regular Google search or a
regional search.

The regular Google search treats all TLDs as equal. I chose a random
word, sex, and searched Google:
://www.google.com/search?q=sex

The top fifteen are:

.org
.org
.com
.org
.com
.com
.org
.us
.uk
.org
.edu
.com
.us
.org
.com

A search for "texas" gets:

.us
.edu
.com
.edu
.us
.edu
.us
.com
.us
.us

If you search for "America", a .us site comes in at #2. Given the
relative numbers of .us to .com, results speak for themselves. From
years of reading webmaster and SEO forums, I have never seen any
evidence to the contrary.

I live in Australia, so when I visit Google I get re-directed to
google.com.au. I have the choice of searching the entire web or just
for Australian sites. In this instance, a .au site has an advantage.

Because .com is the de facto TLD for Americans, it is unlikely that
having a .us domain will ever be an advantage over a .com. It couldn't
possibly be a disadvantage for American regional searches.

If your domain purchase decision is based on having keywords in your
domain, and the .com versions were taken, then you have made a good
choice. Just make sure you only use a single domain for the same
content, for search engine purposes. If you use more than one, make
sure you use robots.txt or a robots meta tag to tell the search
engines not to index it.


Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga

---

Clarification of Answer by robertskelton-ga on 04 Sep 2003 16:13 PDT

The most recent discussion at WebMasterWorld involves your question.
Check out the replies to get an idea of how often it has been asked,
and what the answer always is:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/16719.htm

To my knowledge (not researched), the TLD has no direct effect on the
ranking of sites in search engines.  However, I have observed that
uncommon TLDs lose a portion of their visitors simply because many
Internet surfers assume ".com" on the end of every URL, and get
confused when it's not so. For example, many would-be visitors of your
site may type in tv-satellite.com because the ".com" is reflexive to
them.

Also, it isn't always a reasonable option, but using a hyphen in the
domain name will probably result in fewer hits on your site over time.
 This is because users will often drop the hyphen when typing the URL
in, or may find it inconvenient to type.  If you do want to use a
hyphen, I suggest registering the domain name both with and without
hyphen (tv-satellite.us and tvsatellite.us) if possible, to handle
this case.  You can always give out your URL in a semicapitalized
style to make it obvious what it means, for example
http://DishNetworkTV.us.

You might also consider getting a domain name in the .tv TLD, such as
us-satellite.tv and/or SatelliteUS.tv.  $50.00/yr at
http://www.internet.tv

I'm having this very problem right now.

FlashMob.info has been covering the "Flash Mob" scene for about one
month before FlashMob.com started doing the same.

FlashMob.info has about 6,000+ back links and has been mentioned by
numerous media websites for the last month or so whereas FlashMob.com
has around 400 back links and is hardly mentioned by any media
websites.

From the above facts which website deserves a higher ranking?

I am convinced that Google has a strong bias toward the traditional
TLDs, especially .com!

No, I don't think that search engines give more weight to dot com vs
dot us.  I know for a fact that people do.  Many will enter dot com
out of habit.  Now, what I consider more of a mistake is purchasing
the domain dishnetwork-tv.us.  It sounds like a trademark infringement
lawsuit just waiting to happen.  I would recommend contacting an
attorney specializing in such issues and explain what you want to do
with that domain.  A short initial consultation can probably be had
for free.  It could save you a ton of trouble and money down the road.