I used to think along the same lines as you guys. Why would Google discriminate against .net.au? It makes no logical sense.

Then I actually tried to rank a couple of them!

Maybe this will change in the future (I suspect it will), but from my own personal experience, at the moment google most definitely does discriminate against .net.au.

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Currently Under Development: http://healthinsurancecomparison.com.au |

Yeah I've also changed my thinking in the same way as Jonathan....

I've also posted before a scientific reason why net.au's might suffer in the rankings slightly....CTR

A typical user is probably slightly more likely to click on a com.au website in the search results than a net.au

This preference might indirectly hurt the ranking of the net.au as Google certainly look at CTR in their algo

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CocktailRecipes.com.au ★ Photographers.com.au ★ DebitCard.com.au ★ Hockey.com.au ★ Boxing.com.au ★ DomainName.com.au

Was the .net.au's as old as the .com.au's
Were they developed to the same level.

Was the SEO done correctly?
100's of factors influence the rankings.
the cctld is only a small part of it.

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Managing Million Dollar Sites since 2004

Agree with the theory that users have more preference/trust in .com.au site.

But does Google actually track CTR on SERP pages? I don't see them doing this except for the additional links for the top 1 site.

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Pretty sure they do. Of course it's impossible to say exactly what they do take into account as it's closely guarded. However there are reportedly 200+ factors - would make sense that CTR was in there & fairly high up too.

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CocktailRecipes.com.au ★ Photographers.com.au ★ DebitCard.com.au ★ Hockey.com.au ★ Boxing.com.au ★ DomainName.com.au

Surely they would track it, might not be heavily weighted but it would have to be a factor IMO

From the stats I have .net.au definately rank for long tail which is what you want anyway... higher probability of conversion

Uber competitive terms? I only know of a few examples and generally they have authority (branding etc) or are aged.

Still worth developing in the long run IMO.

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DJUQA - I would have to say that Google can't actually see how old a .au domain is, as they are a US registrar they can see all the ages of .com/.net/.org etc, but for .au domains, even a whois doesn't show up for age. So they can't really take this into account. Maybe a length of time indexed in google would be used, rather than domain age.

Yeah I think it's mostly length of time indexed in Google, but there's also www.archive.org.

As for Google tracking clickthrough rate, they would definitely do it, as would all the SE's. It would have to be one of the best metrics for determining whether the results you were serving to your visitors were any good or not.

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Currently Under Development: http://healthinsurancecomparison.com.au |

Of course time site has been indexed would be used. We all actually use our names and don't sit on them. Therefore all names would be indexed shortly after original registration Date.

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Managing Million Dollar Sites since 2004

great points.