Canadian .com site - need google.ca help

Ranks 1st page in "from web", not showing in "pages from Canada"

[mandalamoon]

Hi,

This is my first post here. This is an amazing forum and I am so glad I've discovered you all.

I've got a bit of a problem on my hands. I recently re-did my husband's local business site, which has a .com domain name, and we are now ranking on the first page of results for our important key words on Google. We are in Canada, and yesterday I noticed that the Google.ca site has a "pages from Canada" option.

I checked our keywords under "pages from Canada" and we are not showing up at all in the search results! Some of the sites that did show up have a .com name, so I'm really puzzled. Is it because they are hosted by a Canadian ISP? (This doesn't really make sense to me, though)

We only mention "Canada" once, on our home page. Is this the problem? Do we need to emphasize that we have Canadian content? Or do we need to have a .ca domain name? And if we had a .ca domain name, if we forward it to our .com name, will the search engines actually see this?

I'm not sure what we should be doing. Luckily, "pages from Canada" is not the default search, but I'd definitely like to get into those results, as we are a completely local company.

Thanks for any help you can give me!

BJ

[abates]

I have a NZ page which is a .com domain and is hosted in America. I have a .org.nz domain registered which redirects to the .com domain with a 301.

From google.co.nz, if I search for "Pages from New Zealand", the main .com domain doesn't show up, but the .org.nz domain does (though only the index page).

Hope this helps.

[Small Website Guy]

My US site, with a .COM domain, no mention of Canada anywhere, shows up as a Canadian site according to Google. I can't figure it out.

Want to switch domains?

[mandalamoon]

Yes, this is perfect. I wasn't sure about forwarding the .ca name, but the 301 redirect makes perfect sense.

Hopefully there won't be any need to trade domains :)

[chinook]

There are some other factors that come into play when search engines deem something to be local content.

In theory, certain blocks of IP addresses have been assigned to different countries. This got muddied a bit as people sold rights to IP addresses or swapped them.

There is also the whois lookup that the search engine can perform which may indicate the orginating locality, however that one is a bit weak as people often put in wrong or incomplete information (sometimes on purpose).

If you do a traceroute to your site, it will show the various routers encountered along the way. A search engine can easily do this as well and it can be completely automated. Routers would be a fairly reliable source of information as to where a site is hosted.

When you consider using a host that is local you still need to ask if they are physically hosting within your country as so many today are in reality resellers of a larger company elsewhere.

[karmov]

Welcome to Webmasterworld mandalamoon!

I'm pretty certain it has to do with where your server's physically located. Though I've not tested this theory. Let us know if the .ca redirect works for you.

Chinook makes a good point though.

I'm Canadian as well and was investigating some hosting. There's a local company I wanted to support and I found out their server's based in the US and they're reselling.

It's not a problem for my plans, but it deffinitely would exclude me from the Canada only searches despite the fact that I'd be doing all of my hosting business with a Canadian company.

[dirty_marra]

We recently had the same problem but in the UK. We switched servers to a UK based server and within 24 hours we were on the "pages from the uk search".

might be an idea to have a word with your host and see if they have any canada based servers. If not you might want to consider switching host.

hope this helps

Marra

[mandalamoon]

Thanks for the additional thoughts on where to host the .ca domain. I had been thinking that we would just host the redirect page at our server (FutureQuest) but now I think we'd better look around for a server based in Canada, just to be on the safe side. Changing servers isn't really an option. My husband just loves FutureQuest because their customer service has been excellent.

It would be nice to get in those Canadian search pages ...

[Rugles]

This has been a problem for a few years. Not sure why and I would not get to worried about it because I do not think many people use that "just sites in Canada" feature.

[Imagicor]

We have several sites that we previously hosted ourselves on an ip block in Canada. All of these sites have a Canadian address in their whois records, all placed well in the google.ca only searches. Every time we moved one of the sites to a US based external host we lost our .ca listings. Looks like the ip address is key.