joeking - 12:04 am on Dec 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

.co.uk domains show up in Google UK only searches irrespective of location of servers. We have a dozen .co.uk sites hosted in the USA that rank very highly in google.co.uk. And one hosted in Turkey (long story!) does the same.

Interestingly, I built a site with very specific UK content that was a .com hosted in the USA. It ranked number one for keywords in google.com, but was nowhere to be found in the UK search results. A .co.uk version of the site was then built, same hosts, and it ranked number one in both UK and elsewhere searches for same keywords.

So for me the extension is very important to Google if hosting outside of the UK.