Using a .de domain for non-german website. Sane?

[adepalma]

Hi there guys(and girls),

I bought a beautiful and clever .de domain, however I plan to use it for a brazillian website.

Since GWT does not allow me to change the target location, and I am stuck with Germany on Google's eyes, I would like to know how bad would it be to stick with the .de domain?

My content won't be international. It will focus only in portuguese(Brazil) content.

Is there a way to make it work? I would really like to stick with this domain, but Google's organic traffic cannot be overlooked...

Thanks in advance for all input I can get.

Cheers

[Andropenis_Australia]

Basically a countries domain ending is always preferred if you are targetting that country. Depending how competitive your domain/keywords are in Brasil it could be fairly easy, or failry hard to rank. Some things to consider. Where you get your links from, if you want it to rank in brasil, get your backlinks form there when possible, also the hosting of your site is a major factor, if you want it to rank in brasil, try and get it hosted there as well. Good luck, and it is possible but you should really go for a local country domain name to make things easy for yourself.

[bele]

You could get a lower CTR rate. and automatically google might lower you down in the results.

There are no more bad reasons not to use it. It should rank same like .org or any other. You just have to make  nice brazillian meta tags and visitors might click on your serp quite well. Also you need a good content.

[adepalma]

Thank you so much for your responses.

The keyword is quite competitive, but all my links will end up coming from .br sites.

My only concern is really how much will Google penalize me for going with a .de domain on a .br territory, considering backlinks, SEO strategies and hosting location would be the same for both the .de and .br domains.

The URL will be 100% readable with the .de domain since in portuguese "DE" means "OF", thus making it entirely readable and optimized.

I am really against the wall: Go for the cool domain and risk getting pounded by Google in ranking, or go for not-so-cool domain and loose a quite interesting advantage, but garantee Google's "approval".

[bele]

For the domain, google will not penalize you at all. You might get a lot of value for the keyword in the domain. Just dont get penalities for bad linking between your websites etc.