COM over US?

[FiRe]

Say I have a website about cars and I can get cars.com or cars.us both with exactly the same content, are search engines (mainly google) more likely to pick up and show pages from the .com than the .us, or do they both have equal chances or appearing in results (assuming I market the site well)?

[benevolent001]

You wont need to market both websites , just promote one website and add redirect to the other to reach the main website

its like domain parking sort of thing

Google wont know about your hidden domain untill you tell him , its redirection is for just users

[FiRe]

No thats not what I meant, I can only have the .com OR .us not both! The .us domain sounds better, but the .com is not available so I would have to get a different domain. I need to decide whether to go ahead with the .us purchase but am worried about page rank for .us domains.

[Robert Charlton]

Dot com and dot us are treated equally by the search engines.

They're not treated equally, though, by various browsers. If I just type in the part of the domain name before the dot into my brower and hit Ctrl-Enter, the browser defaults to .com.

Ditto, most users probably think .com automatically.

That said, many sites do extremely well with .net, and there's no reason that .us should be any different. But so far, .us hasn't really caught on. I assume that eventually it will become more common.

Generally, I advise clients to get, if they can, the .com, .net, and .us versions of their domains, as well as at least the .com and .net hyphenated versions, to keep competitors from using them. We then 301 redirect the extras to the main domain.

[FiRe]

yep thanks, thats all I needed to know as long as they have equal oppurtunities :-)