Registering Domain Names in Italy. Dot com or dot it?
Recently Carlos, after reading this post possibly, contacted me to ask whether Italian sites use the .com and .it domain names. This was an interesting question and oddly enough I had been looking at the Alexa statistics for Italy’s top 100 Internet sites recently and I noticed that both .com and .it domains are used by Italian organisations for sites aimed at Italians.
The question is why there is this mix of .it and .com domains in Italy. Well, here are my theories.
Firstly, the registration process for a .it domain is fiddly and nowhere near as straightforward as that of registering a .com domain. With a .com domain you can be up and running in less than a day. However, if you go for a .it domain, if you are lucky you can have the domain visible in around 24 hours, if not, it may take much longer, especially if the requisite forms are not completed correctly. .it domains are also more expensive.
OK, so above is a practical reason why Italians may prefer the .com domain, but there is more.
In Italy, after having worked with (taught) many young Italians over the last 5 years or so, I’ve noticed that the .com domain is perhaps held in higher regard than the .it domain, and, although I have no proof of this, it would appear to mean that in the eyes of your average Internet aware Italian, the .com domain is possibly holds more credibility. There is one good example of a major Italian company using a .com domain - Il Sole 24 Ore - the Italian publishing and training group, whose site is a .com - www.il24ore.com Interesting is it not?
I also dropped in to my response to Carlos’ question that it would be possible to register both .com and .it names for the same dominion, as indeed have I for one of my other sites. And because I have become a little more SEO aware recently, I happened to mention that I thought that having the same site with both domains may cause SEO related problems. Although, with apologies to Carlos, I had no real evidence for this supposition. Naughty me.
Well, Carlos picked up on my SEO related assertion and wanted to know more. Whoops! After a quick search on Google I found some evidence to support my supposition: here And from that article it does appear as though country specific domains can cause problems for webmasters who are targeting different geographical areas, so although I shot from the hip, much like the cowboys of old, I did not miss. Let’s say that my assumption was more an ‘educated guess’.
There are also some other issues concerning the registration of .it domains.
With regard to those who wish to register and maintain an Italian domain, it could be said that the .it domain is restricted to Italian citizens and those who live in countries within the European Union. This means, for example, that Americans wishing to register a .it domain would have problems, unless, of course, they have a company registered in Italy or they happen to have an Italian ‘partita IVA’ - VAT registration. To read more about this and to find out more about registering a .it domain, I recommend visiting the English version of the Italian domain name registration authority nic.it
Carlos’ contact raised some very interesting issues, and this is why, with his permission, I’ve written this post. Although I know something about this, I am in no way an expert. So if anyone would like to add anything or contradict me, then please feel free, and I’ll modify this post and credit my sources appropriately.
Oops! Slight Technical Hitch - Permalinks
Oh dear. I tried to be clever and implement an SEO optimization - and as a result anyone who found a search engine result leading to my site and clicked on said link would have found a nasty 404 - page not found message.
Luckily I caught on to the problem quite quickly, and I believe I have resolved it, thanks to this post, and thanks to the plugin that you can find here.
Now I can play with things like permalinks and not have to worry too much about nasty collateral effects!
Thanks to Google, I found the solution quickly. Phew!
Oh the joys of being an amateur webmaster.
Please accept my apologies if my tinkering caused problems.
No Winner of the BFI Hunt, Search, and the Presumed Hack Attack
My little competition attracted quite a few people, but nobody posted the winning response. Anyway, the contest is over now. Thanks to anyone who had a go.
I think I’ll run something similar in the future, most probably when the Google search system is fully up and running. Google has not finished indexing Blog from Italy yet, so the search results are still incomplete, I know. This is why there are two search systems at the moment.
The Wordpress search system will disappear once Google is up to speed.
Back to the contest, if anyone did have problems of any kind, then please let me know. At least so I can streamline things in the future.
As for the hack attack I thought I had, my hosting service tells me that there was no attempt to hack attack Blog from Italy, although I remain not 100% convinced. Someone from Australia was doing something odd, and odd things started happening. Oh the joys of running your own site.
Blog from Italy has become www.blogfromitaly.com
Small modification, I know, but Google search no longer likes domain names without www before them, for some reason. In fact it was only showing “YOUR DOMAIN NAME” in the search area. Once I sussed out why, I went for the www. As to what effect this will have, I’m not sure.
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