Ranking in Italy

[sciaf]

Hey guys i would like to know is it easier to rank in Italy lets say like this buying some expired domain make a site and then in webmaster tools to choose Italy so i can rank there also the content will be in Italian but do i need .it domain extension or i can go with .com and is google that harsh as it is in usa and uk?

 

[Torquemada]

Depends on the what you are trying to rank for.

It's just as harsh, but you can also find rubbish and hacked sites in positions #2 & #3. It depends a lot on the market you are targeting and the competition.

For context: I had experience ranking mildly profitable keywords in USA (minisites, 12 yrs ago) and have been "ranking" (i.e. managing) real business sites in Italy for much longer and almost all our money kewywords rank #1 (unpersonalized) rarely fluctuating to #2 for a couple of weeks.

Generally, yes, I'd say it's easier to rank in Italy because:

1. Pro SEOs are mostly clueless and implement long dead practices.
2. There is very little turnaround. Once you have reached #1 on real money keywords it may happen that someone will try to enter the market and G. will sometimes let them disrupt the serps – but they usually don't last as companies. Within two years or even much less they'll go bankrupt.

Of course you have to somehow reach that #1 ranking in first place.

I'd strongly suggest not to buy an expired domain.

If you can find an expiring domain in auction with a relevant and non-toxic backlink profile (or better yet: contact the owner of a soon-to-fail company as mentioned above) then yes. It will help and is likely to provide an initial boost you won't get otherwise.

Given I think you are italian, you probably already know that:

• Guest posts? Nope, don't even think about them. No one blogs professionally except about food & recipies. Personal blogs are tumbleweeds with 3 visitors/month.
• Forums can still be a viable platform for traffic & therefore ranking (if you buy an established one, not if you spam-drop a bunch of nofollow profile links).
• Editorial links from newspapers? Yes. They work like a charm, to me they are the strongest links. But it's very hard to get one. You really need good personal connections or to be already ranking and looking super-authoritative so that the journalist will contact you directly (or sometimes plagiarize your content – more on this later).
• Splogs, private networks, profiles? In my experience IP location is what matters, and you won't find anything worth getting a link from which has content written in italian language and italian IPs.
• "Traffic leaks" opportunities as long discussed in the WF days and here on BUSO are rare and far between in Italy.
• If you produce good content you will get plagiarized. And I don't mean by scrapers, but by people with name & surnames or even newspapers. Take advantage of this: archive.org all your content as evidence and keep checking for plagiarists. Consider this an opportunity to land some quality backlinks by getting in touch with whoever "took inspiration" from your content – lowballers will not reply and 404 the page, but higher level copycats will silently add a contextual dofollow (claiming it was always there, "you just didn't notice" – who cares).
• In summary, getting good backlinks in Italy forces to really be whitehat. But this can be an advantage.

Regarding the .it vs .generic extension:

• By all means try to get an italian IP. All else being equal (as if this was possible in seo...) an .it domain will help with ranking, but a .com with an italian IP will rank better.
• Make sure to set the hreflang property. Search engines will figure out the language regardless, but they seem to like if hreflang is implemented properly.
• (Optional) target the country in search console. I say optional because I had zero issues with non country targeted domains as long as their IPs were italian (needless to say, avoid OVH's virtual geolocation IPs and go with someone hosting at the big datacenters in Milan and Rome).

Last but not least: produce steadily some decent content (given how poor Italy's content marketing is, avoid producing top notch content or too much content) but after a while, make sure to get a lot of traffic (facebook can still be cheap for well targeted free content) to those pages.


My totally unscientific opinion is that normal websites are so underused, that regular spikes in traffic bring a positive boost from search engines.

Kinda like a bot thinking: hey, look, someone is actually visiting a site in Italy that's not a newspaper nor food nor beauty? It must be Pulitzer-worthy!

(Half-kidding, but I did see steady and long lasting increases in organic traffic this way.)

Hope this helps!
(Wow I did managed to make my first post in the orientation forum!)