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Comment by throwaway529 | Hacker News Reader

.eu's not huge in europe. But it's not .biz either.

Some customers might not notice, for some it'll suggest you're heavily EU focused - be aware .fr, .de, etc are definately a thing, and some might mistake you for a government agency offshoot.

But I don't see it heavily associated with .lol, .info, .biz, etc.

The other side of the coin is that non-.eu customers may associate your products or services with only the EU, or perhaps feel excluded.

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> Some customers might not notice, for some it'll suggest you're heavily EU focused - be aware .fr, .de, etc are definately a thing, and some might mistake you for a government agency offshoot.

I am not sure about .fr, but I can tell you for sure that you won’t be mistaken as a government offshoot for using a .de domain, they are extremely common in Germany and are basically standard for any Germany business.

That being said, I guess many people could misunderstand the tld for your business being limited to Germany instead of Europe/EU in general

Thanks. From my research, .eu seems to used by official EU entities like ECB and other government/EU block/EU fans websites.

My biggest concern is being penalized by Google, or being seen as an abusive domain like .lol/.xyz

You won’t be penalized by Google based purely on it being a region- or country-level TLD. However, if you are trying to attract users outside of the EU, they may be less likely to click when they see the .eu TLD. Clickthrough rate on the SERP is a major signal to Google on how to rank a result for a given query.

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