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Has anyone else noticed this? - hopefully it's here to stay as it was quite frustrating having UK sites that wern't being found when people used this option.
Is this google looking to see were the domain 'lives' rather than just rely on the tld?
Gary.
One of my .info sites was #2 out of 5.2million on google.co.uk using the "web" radio button; and NOT FOUND if using the "UK" button! This was the case for the last year or more.
BUT now it is found with the UK search. So something has changed from my perspective (for the better).
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that we're always improving our ability to geolocate web servers. Okay, I guess it wasn't that much longer of an answer. :)
Gary.
I have quite a few sites, some for the UK audience (these are all .co.uk), some for the US audience (these are all .com) and of no interest to anyone in the UK.
All my sites are hosted in the UK.
It bothers me sometimes that the day will come that US visitors will not be served up my sites intended for the US because the sites are hosted in the UK.
This of course could be a problem for a great many sites that have country specific information. A lot of high profile sites have this structure (Microsoft, Adobe, Creative etc. etc. all have parts of their site for specific countries).
Someone in the US might want a site to be shown to the UK audience but have the site hosted in the US. At the moment a UK visitor clicking on the "pages from the uk" button won't see this site, even though it is intended for them.
The solution at the moment would be to run a server in the country you want a site to be shown in. This isn't always practical or affordable. And doesn't get around the problem of one site have multi-country sections "US visitors click here", "UK visitors click here" etc.
The most obvious way to me would be to use a country meta tag that could contain the country the *page* is directed at. So if a US hosted site had pages that had the country set to "UK", then if someone in the Uk ticked the "pages from the UK" button, they would be served these pages up along with the rest. Someone ticking a "pages from the US" button would not get these pages, even though they are hosted in the US.
Other advantages of this are the SERPS quality would be better as well. At the moment someone in the Uk clicking the "Pages from the UK" button gets my pages meant for the US, which diminishes the quality slightly.
What's googles throw on this. It's a global internet but webmasters don't have total control that country specific pages will be shown in the country the page is directed at.
By the way, does the US version of google have a "pages from the US" button, or do they get all pages on google.com only, often wondered about this.
