Country specific domain extension

Will domain extension harm my rankings

[workshy]

I need to promote a website for a UK company who want to use the Italian extension, .it

Would it be difficult the get good rankings in UK search engines using a country specific extension?

[bakedjake]

More difficult than using the country specific code or one of the general TLDs, yes, but certainly not impossible.

Try and host the site in the UK, and try and obtain links from other UK sites. List an address in the UK on the site.

[canadafred]

I'm inclined to think that the margin of advantage would depend more on the keyphrase you were targeting rather than the domain extension. For generic keyphrases, there'd only be a slight advantage for the uk based websites using a regional search engine but most of the competition will revolve around what site apparently offers the best content for the search. On the other hand, if your keyphrase was like "British tabloids" your uk challengers would probably smoke you.