My English site ranks instead of local language site in Google local

[rubikky]

Hi...

I have 3 websites for 3 languages which are English, Italian and French.

The English site is the oldest which around 6 years and received the highest number of backlinks.

Italian and French site are fully translated to each languages with almost no English on it. They both got a decent number of backlink but fewer than English and age of the site is around 4 years for both.

Problem: When I search for one of my main keyword in Italian in Google IT, my English page ranks on the first page for this keyword while this page in Italian is on 8th page or something.

Anyone know why Google choose to rank English instead of Italian in Google IT for Italian keyword?

Any suggestion and what to improve would be much appreciate.

Thanks a lot in advance.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

#1 - Google crawlers are based in California regardless of where the site is so redirecting visitors based on country won't solve indexing issues all by itself BUT those visitors will be using Chrome and Google toolbar which also reports data back to Google so make sure you DO redirect visitor by country. Provide visitors with an option to change language if that is an issue.

#2 - Google is not likely "mistakenly" ranking the wrong site on page one in this case, instead it looks like your .com deserves a higher rank than your .it or .fr and both are ranked. Since that's probably the case you will want to consider #3 carefully as it may just cut rankings for the .com without improving the .it or .fr

#3 - Google webmaster tools allows you to designate a country for your sites, since you have a site for each country it might be something you want to do to avoid future "competing with yourself" issues. That being said it may only serve to reduce your traffic to each site if they aren't actually competing against each other in the sense you suspect. use with caution.

#4 - If all three sites are on U.S. based servers consider #3 for the .it and .fr sites, even better would be to find servers in France and Italy for performance reasons.

I'd do step #1 and wait a few more months.