I had a small discussion with a buddy of mine who runs a few websites and he suggested that I look at changing my domains from .ca to .com

Has anyone else done this and seen an increase of traffic like he mentions? I understand that when you think of a URL or a web address you instinictively think of blahblah.com right?

One of the domain names I have unfortunately did not have its .com available so I took its .CA (the site resides in Canada and currently offer Canadian content).

Anyway my blog is also .CA because I live in Canada and its located in Canada and I am proud to be Canadian ;) www.tingram.ca to mean seems better than tingram.com ;)

.com were meant to be Commerical Sites. Just like .org is Organizational, .gov is Government etc.

Look at the motherboard manufactures like ECS and MSI? Their sites are www.ecs.com.tw and www.msi.com.tw respectively. Both of couse being taiwanese.

If I were able to get the .com versions of my sites would that increase traffic like my buddy said?

Though my sites (www.tingram.ca and www.bigtips.ca) are not the greatest nor do they currently offer much content, but hopefully as time progresses, so will they.

Thanks

Switching from a .ca to a .com will not increase your search engine rankings but you may get some more traffic from the people who mistakenly type .com when going to your .ca site.

If you change the domain name or switch from a .ca to a .com then Google will treat it as a brand new site, perhaps with a sandbox effect, and you will lose whatever rankings and inbound links you have on the .ca.

You are better off getting the .com and redirecting it to your .ca.

What Techno said is correct.

Thanks for the replies :)

Have you checked tingram.com and bigtips.com? They both are taken, years ago...