I've yet to see an EU domain have any serious impact on organic results. Can anyone contradict this?

Andy

Apart from the register doing a very bad job during the sunrise period, most interesting domain names were bought and are locked by squatters. I think this is a reason for the scarce circulation and few results.

I'll go out on the limb here with some considerations concering my experience with my .name TLD

At first, when it was attracting big search engines attention after gathering some links, there was traffic flowing in from all local versions of major search engines, in particular Google of course.

But as time progressed, local versions of Google disappeared from my referrals. I was left with Google.com and Google.it

From what I gather, there was a general attention towards the .name at first and was visible worldwide. As Google identified me as a bilingual resource, it dropped off the regional versions feeding traffic only from .com and .it

My guess would be that something similar would happen once the website is established and there are no incoming regional links.

How does that sound ??

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Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

Pwefff!!!! it's just not done properly - Why should an EU TLD be any different than a COM? Maybe we should start a web from start and just try it. My believe is that most companies that buy the EU TLD ending are just routing it to their COM, IS, DK or what ever ending and because of that Google and the rest are just not indexing it - Duplicate Content issues :-) I think I wrote something about this on www.optimizeyourweb.com some years back or was it months? hmmm

It's normal. From experience, domain name has no much impact. IP address has much bigger impact.

Good morning/afternoon/evening to you wherever you are,
I disagree with the last entry - IP will not have a major Impact and should be viewed as a secondary factor w.r.t. domain name. The latter is a major factor if you are working in a very competitive market segment (i.e. hotels and travel)

It is a known fact that people shop for web hosting worldwide and host TLD for Italian sites in the USA or Germany, and France (we do this regularly).

What you might want to explore to further your competitive advantage (or to catch up with competition) is a dedicated IP with a local TLD name.

This is my experience

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Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

I strongly disagree with this. ccTLD and keywords in your domain name can have a huge impact on the organic results, IP is used as a secondary measure by especially Google to determine where a site is "from".

That said, I doubt having a .EU domain does anything positive other then make it obvious that your site is European. But that's not exactly a local region and as far as I am concerned gives no more benefit then a .com domain.

I'd agree with the above - domain name is much more important than IP

It's interesting to see your experiences though Sante. I've wondering what use (if any) the .eu domain is in terms of the search engines. As Peter says, it doesn't seem to have any advantage over the .com in the global search.

I was hoping that it would get treated preferentially within all EU member - local searches but it seems from what you are saying Sante, that Google looks to the language and then places it within one country sphere.

Maybe one day we'll see Google.eu come onto the scene and then people will have a reason to use these domains rather than just redirect them?

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E3internet: Russian Online Marketing

RussianMarketer.com | RussianMarketer.ru

Personal Blog: 300km North of Moscow. Skype nick_wilsdon

I would question the benefit of a Google.eu though, when I am say in The Netherlands looking for something I have little to no interest in French, German, etc results.

As it stands now I can't see the market for this (yet). Perhaps in the future if the EU further integrates, but that would be a discussion of a political kind and we would digress from the topic of seo.

True - but with these agreements on a common European consumer law it may be a safer option for you to buy from within the EU than say, from the US. Also common agreements on taxes could make goods from within the EU very attractive. All things that EU marketers could use to their competitive advantage. As you say though some of these things depend on further integration but I can see this as a future trend.

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E3internet: Russian Online Marketing

RussianMarketer.com | RussianMarketer.ru

Personal Blog: 300km North of Moscow. Skype nick_wilsdon