Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Could this be causing me a drop in rankings?
We host a .co.uk site in the US, and ever since jagger we were in the top 10 for all of our keywords.
Do you think if moved the rankings would improve?
Bek.
It really makes a difference when you search locally.
A site is seeen as being British if it's got a .uk TLD _or_ is hosted on a UK-based server.
I think it is a lot more sophisticated than that.
I host a .com address on a USA server - and the site is classed as being in the UK by Google.
How were you able to tell that?
The .uks hosted in the US perform just aswell when doing a uk only search or global
Funny but our site is higher on the .coms and nowhere on the UK
Any clues?
Bek.
so you are saying your .com hosted in the US is higher when searched global than it is when searched for UK only, if its hosted in US it will be higher
I had a .com site, hosted in the US which listed in the UK SERP's for 3 years then one day it just dissapeared.
I moved the .com site to a UK server and IP Block and 2 days later I was back in the UK listings.
impossible, a .com would only show up as UK based IF it had a UK IP
Odd then that Google news says that we are a UK site - even though we have a .com address in a server farm in Texas.
I think you will be missing a lot of UK traffic... how are your rankings for 'UK only' compared to global?
About a third of our traffic is actually from UK IP addresses, so I am not too worried about it.
We do lose out as far as search rankings are concerned - if someone uses google uk and searches only for sites in the UK.
....just as we lose out for Oz, German, Canadian etc specific searches.
Frankly, every "global focus" web site is going to lose out with this odd mania for local searching going on.
Quite why the physical location of a website is of importance when trying to read the news confuses me, but I do tend to read the news from all over the world - so maybe I am the oddity here?
Odd then that Google news says that we are a UK site - even though we have a .com address in a server farm in Texas.
That isn't really accurate: AFAIK Google News doesn't say anything (or seem to care) about the location of a website. Google News UK returns articles it thinks are relevant to a UK audience.
The same doesn't apply to Google Search results (what the original post was about), where Google both attempts to locate websites geographically, and can even display different results based on what it thinks is the searcher's location.
IMO it's always better to host your website in the same location as your target audience, or to use a corresponding regional domain name, especially as local search is getting more and more attention.
AFAIK Google News doesn't say anything (or seem to care) about the location of a website. Google News UK returns articles it thinks are relevant to a UK audience.
Google News .com explicitly states in the results that we are a UK site.
Google News .com explicitly states in the results that we are a UK site.
I haven't seen countries mentioned in the News results - do you have an example?
Edit: Ah, "the example.com, UK" sources under individual articles - I thought sites specified this information themselves? (Some say UK, some say United Kindgom, so I assumed it was user data)
If you're selling primarily to UK surfers, or you're home audience is important to you, you can get a boost from being a .co.uk, or being on a UK server. It does make a difference.
As UK web hosts are well behind in features and service compared to the US, it's a good idea, if you're just starting out, to get a .co.uk as your main domain, and host in the US.
** Some UK web hosts' IPs are seen as being Dutch. Some UK web hosts actually host in the USA. See if their own site comes up in 'UK only' searches. And ask for a shared IP number.
