[Marks]

Hey, I was wondering how significant you think the .com / .co.uk part of the domain is, and how much affect it has on new users visiting the site?

Are you more likely to join a .com forum than a .co.uk, if for example, you are american?

I'm asking because a while back we were forced to move hosts, and in part of this process we moved from .com to .co.uk (the rest of the domain stayed the same). The reason for this was because we didn't want to have to wait for the domain to transfer, and we were a relatively new site anyway so we weren't too worried about losing the page ranking etc. The .com has been redirecting to the .co.uk ever since.

Since then we have built up a lot more backlinks, and SEO ranking than we had before. We are far from at our desired position, but we are getting there.

I've been considering paying to get the .com transferred over, as I do worry that we could be losing non british members because of the .co.uk domain. However if we were to do this, we would be losing our google ranking for the .co.uk, and would involve a fair bit of work to get the forum up and running on the new domain also.

What do you think? I've added a poll.