pete - 8:06 am on Oct 16, 2000 (gmt 0)

Renke - "Could it be that they are weeding non dot-com sites with low linkage?

It has always been a struggle getting our countries extension "co.za" into A.V with good listings. But, most of these sites are hosted in S.A and as a result, spiders struggle to make it accross the trans-atlantic link. However ,I have found that that even our sites which we host in the northern hemisphere with this extension struggle and as a result I always go for a .com.

I think that your friend will have to register a .com site and use that as his major SE marketing tool for the big US engines. Difficulty here is that after a period of 6 mths, he may have fantastic listings in other engines. Adding another english site to the mix could result in duplicate listings and penalties and the challenge will therefore be to make the site sufficiently dissimilar. Which for me, is still one of the million $ questions that I am tackling and stumbling over every once in awhile.