I need written backing / links to reports for why local domains often will work best (when the target is not specifically international).
The arguments i have are listed in the end, other arguments are welcome as well
I work for an art school in norway, a smaller european country.
we have both a .no (cctld) and a .com-domain, which both link to the same server, and thus has the same info on it.
The school is hardly found on google at all, or linked to from other places, and i am currently about to do something about this.
My problem is that the leader of the school wants to promote the .com-domain because he thinks it sounds more international - even though all our info is in norwegian, and directed towards norwegians, and because he has some strange idea about less eventual juridic trouble with what is added to a .com-domain.
i want to promote the .no domain and not the .com domain because:
1. credibility
I think it gives more credibility with a .no-domain, as anyone can get a .com domain.
2. academic institution
we are a school, and should in that case have opted for a .edu-domain, not a .com-name
3. what people expect
people writing emails to us, have actually wrongly written the adresses, automatically using .no. people expect a norwegian school to end in .no
4. search engines
people have the possibility to use eg site:.no on google, and aparently other search engines as well will often give a better ranking to a local domain
I have found the following links till now:
[useit.com...]
[webdesign.templatemonster.com...]
Hope somebody out there can help
Astrid
Does anybody know about any surveys about this?
Best regards, astrid
and remember if you wanna go local, use local domains and/or local hosting. Local language is of course mandatory :)
