Does using a country domain (TLD) negatively effect a site's search ranking if the site content isn't country specific? [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Does Google penalize .me or .tv sites?

I have a website in which the content is not country specific. The TLD is currently .it but the company is hosted and based in the United States. I'm wondering if a .it domain will negatively effect the site's search rankings. Is it better to use a .com TLD?

For example (I don't actually own these domains), would the domain love.it have a worse ranking than loveit.com? (Assuming the content of the sites is the same)

I've been searching everywhere for an answer with not much luck. Any advice would be very helpful.

Answer 1

No. From Google's FAQ:

*.com, .org, .gov, .ponies—does my top-level domain impact my site's performance in search?

Google's goal is to return the best and most relevant results to the user, regardless of the top-level domain. If our system determines that the best result is a page on a new gTLD, we'll return that page in search results.*

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1050724#gTLDs

Answer 2

However, Google does use ccTLDs as a signal for geotargeting, so if you can avoid using a ccTLD for content which is intended to have a wider audience than a specific country, I'd recommend doing so.

There's a very similar question/discussion here: Advantages of country TLD vs. .com