Holy SEO! The Vatican on Google
If you search for “vatican” on Google, the first result that shows up is not the PR9 official website of the Vatican, or the Wikipedia page for the Vatican City, but instead you will see a page titled Vatican: the Holy See, the homepage of www.pedofilo.com.
The website is currently down, but it’s still showing on the Google SERP (you’ll get the official “choose your language page” on Bing though.)
It’s a pity, from a SEO point of view, not to be able to analyze the code and the link profile of the page, but it’s interesting to see that the Google SERP isn’t showing the global homepage of the Vatican at all, or the English homepage: Wikipedia scores the second and third spot, the fourth goes to the Vatican’s YouTube channel, the fifth to the official .va Vatican Museums’ page and only the sixth is a vatican.va homepage in French.
The Vatican suffered from a long tradition of link bombing and brand-jacking, and as Nichola Stott pointed out in her Vatican VA website review, the website itself is not an example of usability and good web design.
Pierluigi Ruotolo on Twitter deserves credit for a finding that could make us question the value of keywords in URL for SEO. Also the exclusive .va TLD seemed more powerful last Christmas, but now .coms have taken the crown. Is it time to go Bing, or maybe Google is evolving into an “Answer Engine” like Wolfram Alpha? 
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