good news - my observations...

[filmlion]

i am a professional seo guy, but mostly work in the american market, so not quite familiar with most current situation in russian SE world, however i dealt with it before.

with my new interest in IDNs i've made a research on the market and have not so bad news for you guys - those who deal with idn.coms.

there is a chance that .com will not only beat the idn.ru but also will beat the idn.newrussianidntld (say: idn.rf - both in russian: домен.рф)

while yandex is #1 se in russia (some stats say: over 54% together with mail.ru whose SERP also comes from yandex), google is heavily increasing it's presence there. some stats say it's already about 24% - which means 24% of russian internet users use google to search for something on the web. it's not so bad already (it is like yahoo in the USA).

knowing for sure that despite i personally don't like google - it has quite strong alorithm which makes its results more relevant and clearer. (i love yahoo more for the better and more relevant results, but that's not a point here). google also has so many additional cool features, plus it's famous adwords and adsense programs - the last one is a love of many russian webmasters and they will promote google that way... and a known name, almost as known as yandex (in russia.)

that's why yandex started to heavily advertise on TV, radio and other mediums - it knows that google is quite serious about taking over the lion's share in the russian SE market. many russian seo-s and webmasters are always complaining about yandex's SERP and it really has lots of problems to be solved.

any way, i can talk a lot about it - but to make the long story short - my point is that google said it would continue its growth in russia - i am sure it would! for those who don't know -google love .com (it loves .gov and .edu more but those are not our cases) - .com is the king - .com means a lot in the US and market and even in europe - the new .eu will eed really much time to beat .com.

now, u know my point - it's another argument in favor of idn.com domains - google wouldn't support .ru or a new russian idn tld - google would support .com.

all the stats are not 100% accurate but quite close to be true. hope my point makes sense for you. if you agree or disagree, let's discuss it here.

any thoughts?

[thefabfive]

Thanks for the interesting information.

I don't know if Google wouldn't support .ru, but .com does offer other advantages. First, there are no restrictions on .com as there are on .ru. And if .ru doesn't support IDNs soon, then the gap will shrink even more. Also, the cost could be an issue. And lastly, if the sunrise period for .ru goes as well as .eu did then there probably won't be anything left for the average person.

[filmlion]

thanks for your additional thoughts on the topic. sorry for misunderstanding of the "will not support .ru" statement - of course it will support it as any other tld-s - i meant it will not make neither .ru not the new russian idn tld (i.e. .рф) as the most important TLD because .com is what their algorithm likes the most and it will support the US economy by bringing much money from Russian to the US (for them to buy .com domains not old or new russian tlds). it might be possible that they'll make the new russian tld more important than .net, but i am pretty confident that never more important than .com. of course domain tld is not a big deal for seo - but it still matters - for domains it's a big deal (which orginates from recognition and believe it or not from seo too).

[stbmax]

Being that Yandex has not been very welcoming of the IDN.com, Google can do itself a big favour, by being IDN.com friendly.
That will only help us, as well as getting Google a very big foot in the door, of the Russian market, and ensuring them a much quicker increase in market share.
Combined with the addition of Google Adwords/Adsense for Russian, as per Michaels post: http://www.dnlocal.com/general_discu...t-t1592.0.html
It certainly looks very good for Russian IDN.com.

[261275]

One of the things that are not helping Russia's internet grow is the fact that they still pay for they're internet per usage/bandwidth...(thats why you will find russians religiously use icq i.e rather then skype as it takes less bandwidth)

Surely this poor 'setup' wont be here long and it will change to be like we now know it..monthly rates (the monthly rate there now for dsl is @ the $100.00 range which is too much for most) major corporations are working on changing that.