Question

[shig]

This could be a very ignorant question...
I live in the U.S. and when I don't know the extension to a domain name I automatically try .com first and then .net.
Say you live in India... and you don't know the extension. Do you look up .in first? Or do you look up .com and then .in instead of .net?
Just trying to understand the popularity of 'the other' TLDs in other countries (other than U.S.)

 

[AbdulBasit.com]

I always look for .com

 

[TheBaldOne]

The 'rule of thumb' by which domainers generally work is that the .com is as popular in English speaking/writing countries as the national ccTLD. This is and will change though as more sites are developed in the national ccTLD.

If parking the domain remember that when someone has visited a parked page it is highly unlikely they will return to it, instead finding another site (probably the local ccTLD over other gTLD's) to fulfill their requirements.

The next question then is about an individual sites popularity generally. When I developed a .ST hack (JesusChri.st by putting the Bible on it) it quickly overtook in the rankings of everything except the .com and looked like overtaking that soon had I not had to take the site down due to copyright. So this acceptance of ccTLD's complicates matters somewhat. At the moment the greatest number of developed sites are .com's, but as already stated this is changing, and in some countries quicker than others (.de, .cn, .jp are but a few of many).

Hope this confusing answer explains why I started by saying it is only a 'rule of thumb'.

 

[shig]

Thanks... great advice. Jesus Christ is copyrighted????

 

[TheBaldOne]

JesusChrist is not copyrighted it was the Bible that is copyrighted! Unbelievable I know, but it is! But I am trying to get around that 'legally' at the moment, just everything takes time!