should I buy a .it domain?

[lethal0r]

I have a domain in mind along the lines of howtoget.it which makes for a nice sounding, easily memorable address.

but will I have trouble ranking it, and will it be harder to resell?

the .com and .co.uk are taken, the .org.uk is available, but im not keen on this extension as I feel it makes the site seem a little cheap.

what would you do?

 

[accelerator]

Personally I would buy a .com or .co.uk. I don't think the clever usage of other extensions works that well, it just adds confusion.

Rgds

 

[doodlebug]

No chance with regards to successful SEO and yes .it just confuses people, if most seen howtoget.it they would probably type this instead howtogetit.com or .co.uk

I wouldn't bother :|

 

[Blossom]

Think it might be harder to rank in Google UK as is a country-specific extension.

Hard to say without knowing what you want to rank for though. If it's not that competitive you could be in with a chance.

Harder to resell to a UK market, but don't know how it would look from an Italian perspective - they might be keen. Same as how we use French words to sound a bit posh

 

[pete_m]

I don't think the .it ending will make it sound cheap.

There are certainly potential issues with type in traffic, but I'm not sure that will count for a huge proportion of your traffic.

Something like howtoget.it is memorable; techy types in particular will have no problems with a .it domain (think about how popular bit.ly is).

I can really see this working for PPC - plenty of opportunity for keyword stuffing in the display URL.

Regarding SEO - I don't see why you can't do well. Particularly if you host on a UK-based server, and set the target audience in Google's Webmaster Tools.

 

[lethal0r]

thanks all, i'll have a serious think before i make any move.

 

[Blossom]

Particularly if you host on a UK-based server, and set the target audience in Google's Webmaster Tools.

Not really sure if this actually makes a difference - I have a .nu site hosted on US servers & set as US-based in Webmaster Tools & doesn't seem to have had any effect on google.com results.

 

[TinkyWinky]

unless you can secure the .com - I wouldn't personally... UNLESS

it's buy.it or rent.it for example.

TW

 

[pete_m]

Not really sure if this actually makes a difference - I have a .nu site hosted on US servers & set as US-based in Webmaster Tools & doesn't seem to have had any effect on google.com results.

It's very difficult to measure, particularly with a sample size of 1. However, both those steps are simple and one-off measures - and they certainly won't hurt.

Plus I could believe that Google has (slightly) different ranking factors for different Google country sites (i.e. google.com vs google.co.uk vs google.com.au).

 

[retired_member34]

Regarding SEO - I don't see why you can't do well. Particularly if you host on a UK-based server, and set the target audience in Google's Webmaster Tools.

I thought you weren't able to set a geographic target for a .it, same as you can't for .co.uk?

 

[pete_m]

I thought you weren't able to set a geographic target for a .it, same as you can't for .co.uk?

Oops - quite right. The geo targeting is only for non-country specific TLDs like com, org, or net.

 

[lethal0r]

I thought you weren't able to set a geographic target for a .it, same as you can't for .co.uk?

so off the bat its only going to rank well in italy? and I can only nudge google in the right direction with uk backlinks and uk hosting?

sounds like i'd be at an immediaite disadvantage. seo would be my primary focus too.