Will a .us extension rank well

I would like to purchase a keyword domain name with high traffic and the only extension available is a .us.
All the sites in the SERP's are .com and I was wondering if that site will even stand a chance against those in terms of SEO.
I am also only interested in US traffic at present so that's a plus.
Thanks for the reply Darius.

well there are many times that Google ranks .org better than .com

They aren't used nearly as much as TLD's, but I can't think of a single time I've ever seen a .us domain in search results.

Once again, the TLD doesn't matter for SEO purposes except in certain country specific searches as Darius mentioned. Even then, there are country specific domains, like .TV, that have become virtually generic in terms of their affect on search results.

I've only bought a few .us domains though, primarily because you can't use private registration with a .us domain.

The TLD is absolutely irrelevant for general SEO benefits. For regional searches, yes it helps, but even then there are ways around that.

Different TLD's having better/worse ranking potential is for me, on the evidence of my own testing, another forum "jungle drums" falacy.

Personally I would prefer a COM NET or ORG, US could be ok for a US specific site, but still is not embraced like co.uk / de

I'm actually trying to rank a site with the .cz.cc extension (which is Czech) I'll see how it goes.

Extension does not have any thing to do with SEO. Dot com extensions is the most common that there is out there. It is more important to get a popular key word for the domain name than be very concerns about the extensions for search ranking. If you are going to pass out the domain name my month, flyers or business cards then using a I could see using a more common extension like dot com or dot net would be better than dot us. Simply because of the fact that most people will automatically put in dot com because they are use to it.

Hi Jordanwarrior,

I was looking for that answer as well and the closest answer to that was from Mr.cutss himself...Google's Matt Cutts: Websites Using ccTLDs Should Contain Content Relevant To The Specific Country Code

I agree with the people who are saying that the domain extension isn't too important in regards to SERPs. Why don't you see a lot of .us sites ranking high? Well, compared to .com, .net, .org, there simply aren't very many of them!

There was a similar thread not too long back about ranking .me domains. Some people said there that the domain extension doesn't matter, and there are some times when a .me extension works well (for a site that can be read as a couple of words, such as Help Me (help.me), Date Me (date.me), etc, etc). There are .me sites that rank (think linklicious.me, which I use). But not a lot of them. Because, guess what ... there aren't a lot of .me domains (compared to the "big" extensions).

I have a private network of sites, and I usually buy .com domains. But I've found, and purchased, more than a few .me and .us domains with good Page Rank, and they've held that Page Rank (well over a year). Now, PR isn't the same as ranking position in a search, but it shows that Google treats a "non-major" extension the same when dishing out Page Rank, so I don't know why Google would "punish" a site in rankings due to its domain extension.

Winner goes to Genos for digging up a two and a half year old thread for no good reason. Never seen a thread over two years old bumped up before.