I think the issues are confusion and credibility, I doubt it has any effect on SEO in terms of ranking personally. Maybe it would effect CTR, I'm not sure.

Confusion in terms of people needing to remember the entire domain, not just the keywords, that isn't the case with .com.au because they know know just about any Australian business will have a .com.au domain, so with .net.au they need to remember, "hey this company is using a non standard extension, I need to remember .net.au as well as the keywords". In my view that is like adding a word or two to the length of your domain.

Credibility in terms of it sounding cheap, 2nd best.

With the amount of very usable .com.au domains available that isn't likely to be the choice people will have. If the want a keyword domain it will just mean weaker keywords, but not something totally left of field.

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Yes, I think you are probably right. Personally I would rather have bluewidgets.net.au than adelaidebluewidgets.com.au but that is just my personal preference.

I do think though that over the next say 5 years .net.au will gain more acceptance as .com.au becomes harder to get and more expensive. I think businesses have had it pretty good in Australia with all the restrictions that were in place combined with a relatively small population, there have traditionally been good .com.au relevant domains available all the time. I think that is changing though and as we see more and more businesses using .net.au the general public will get used to it and learn to remember whether it was .net.au or .com.au.

.Net.au domains can often currently be worth their reg fee and thats about it, until it seems two or more parties want it, then they start going for a bit more. There was a day a month or so ago on drop (it was a particularly good day for .net.au but still): acn.net.au – $1601, dot.net.au – $956 were a couple of the .net.au domains that got caught while there are still quite a few premium LLL .net.au domains unregistered. I predict as the au namespace becomes more and more filled out, there will be more and more times when more that one business / person is interested in getting the .net.au domain name for whatever reason. In other words, I predict demand will pick up over the next 5-10 years.

I personally think 2nd best is better than nothing, in most situations. So I couldn't resist grabbing creditcardapproval.net.au just then for $16 as creditcardapproval.com.au just dropped for $2550! Surely the .net.au is worth more than 0.62% of the .com.au version!!

.net.au registrations are up 30% on this time last year, but they are dwarfed by .com.au:

http://www.ausregistry.com.au/report...LIC-201008.pdf

Might take more than 5 years for that gap to shrink?

Also It wasn't that long ago that auDA was celebrating the 1 millionth registation (2 years) - getting pretty close to 2 mil now..

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Index > Rank > Monetise

About 7 weeks ago I acquired carloancalculator.com.au (undeveloped and not indexed), when I started the .net.au version was #2 and #3.

In 7 weeks I became #1.

So one of two things happened here... Either my SEO ability is greater than that of the .net.au or .com.au gets some favourtism when it comes to SEO...

The debate goes on...

A few people have shared similar experiences as Shaun has mentioned. I have a couple .net.au exact match domains that I can't get on the front page with competition that isn't hard to beat. 6 months later the best I've done is to get one on page 4.

That could be, what I call the Google honeymoon period. Sometimes I have noticed when you first put up a site, especially for exact phrase domains they will often go direct to number one, or at least top 5 and then slowly start falling. I have seen this time and time again. For example I have a domain which has a holding site (amazon affiliate site) on it called greengrocer.net.au. Literally within a couple of weeks it was consistently within top 3 results on google, often number 1 for "Greengrocer" and "Online Greengrocer", now 18 months later it is nowhere to be found (which is hardly surprising as it has never been updated). The site is just an Amazon affiliate site so Google probably knows that and has pushed it way down the list now, but I have seen the initial high rankings with all sorts of domains not just Aussie ones. I reckon Google is testing new domains when first indexed to see click through response.

Or it could be your SEO skills, or it could be that Google favours .com.au. It would be interesting for someone to buy identical .net.au and .com.au domains put up the exact same sites add exactly the same inbound links and see how Google ranks them...

Very interesting. I would be surprised if Google wasn't using CTR as a major metric for ranking (not just initially).

I wonder also if google looks at the number of inbound links over time. eg if you get some sites linking to you at the start (via SEO work) and then the number of linking sites doesn't grow then perhaps google gradually marks those sites down over time because it would know the initial links are likely an attempt to boost rankings.

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