SEO and Top Level Domain choices

Hello,
From personal experience it seems that .info sites do not do so well though I have seen a few in the ranks for some niches, but never have seen any doing well with gaming. So perhaps in a non competitive niche they are ok?
I also read somewhere that Google does not care too much for them anymore since they are so cheap and everyone was using them to spam with. I heard rumours that the Big G is de-indexing them in some situations. But I am not sure if this is true or not.

As for the rest, and from someone that has done a lot of competitor research in very competitive niches, it seems to matter little what TLD is used, with one .ws site competing very well for certain game related phrases.

Not for those particular extensions.

Standpoint of se traffic? You mean rankings? No it doesn't matter regarding the three
you mentioned above. Will not affect PR. They're all optimized the same.

Whenever I land on a non .com site it just strikes me as low end. If you can choose a domain that is acceptable to you that is a .com I would recommend going that route. Its harder to get the names you really want as its highly competitive but a secondary less favorite domain name with a .com should be a better option for you than .biz, .info etc.

Yes, I agree with Christina's reply. Pls go for .com domains if u can. Maybe that's my prefs.

.com domains appeals to international audience but if your market is local then its better to buy a country specific domain.
I am very sure that very soon we will have state specific domains as well.

The main reason why many people recommend going for .com domains is because some of them, if KW rich and short enough, may stand a good chance to be typed in the browser's address bar directly by people searching for a site that they think should be named like that... and they sometimes add the .com to it.

In such a case, the reason to have a .com is obvious, if you can possibly get it.

Otherwise... it's all what people think, not what it really is.

I couldn't find anywhere an official mention from Google or other search engine - if that matters - that they are having different standards for different tld's...

That being said, I've seen many times .info sites outranking more 'reputable' .com (sometimes older) websites, for certain KW's.
Ultimately, that is what counts: the proper SEO for each of the pages/sites involved in the comparison.

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to say what Google would really rank first, then second, etc... in terms of equal domain name, but different tld's, because normally there is different content on those websites, too.

However I could imagine an experiment where someone could buy a number of available domains (same name) with all possible tld's, perform same very basic SEO tasks on them (for indexing purposes) and let them be spidered and ranked by SE's...to see what the results would be?

If someone did that, I'd like to see such an experiment.

Otherwise, all opinions are only based on personal opinions and preferences...

My 2 cents!

Steve Lorenzo SEOVirtuoso