how does google know country in?

USA and UK content

[davejs]

Hi

If i have a ".com" domain and i want to serve UK content for people visiting with UK IP addresses and USA content for people with USA IP how will google decide if my site is UK or USA?

When someone hits "pages from UK" button will my site appear?

Does it look at server IP location for any of this?

Are the googlebot spiders worldwide or are all their IP's USA based? If they are USA based will google only ever get my USA returned content?

thanks for any help on this!

[shaadi]

Depends in which country you would host your pages. You host in UK - you will come up for pages from UK

[MHes]

shaadi is correct for google, but other engines using google results like aol and yahoo.co.uk only seem to take .co.uk for 'uk only' searches.

The safest longterm bet is a .co.uk hosted in the UK. At the moment a .co.uk hosted anywhere will appear on all google uk only results, be they on yahoo or aol or google itself.

[davejs]

thanks for info...

Hosting is in USA...

It seems in order to do this I will have to have a .co.uk for UK content and also a .com for USA content.

Trouble is I dont want both showing up on google with similar content!

Any other ideas?

[kanama]

i think recent stats when i looked into this was that a third of uk google users use google.co.uk, although im not sure what search they use (web or uk only)

the only way to get into the uk search was to have a uk ip (ie hosted in the uk) or a .co.uk domain

my set up was to change my .com to a 301 re-direct and use .co.uk as my main domain

i didnt want to risk having a mirror and being punished by google. it was quite easy for me as the site was new so i didnt have to worry about page rank etc

[davejs]

Ive never used a 301 before, looks fairly easy to set up though.

If i have the .com with the index.html re-directing to the root of the .co.uk site then if someone types in www.widgets.com they will get www.widgets.co.uk right?

What if i have subdomains under the .com?
ie. [frenchcontent.widgets.com...]
Will the 301-redirect on the root of www.widgets.com effect any subdomains from being spidered?

I guess as long as i link to the .com subdomains from the .co.uk home page they will still be picked up and spidered properly?

Am i right?

Thanks!