Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
#5 in .com (#2 pre-Jagger!)
both sites report >100,000,000 results for the phrase.
UK-hosted .com site.
I dont mind though, as I recieve as much traffic from both US searchers and Aus searchers (though there are 10:1 population wise) so I do believe it makes a difference.
Further, a competitor of mine who is targeting Australian traffic made the mistake of purchasing .com and has his site hosted in the US (rents a shop/hosting package) - he doesnt even show up in the .au searches, which is great for me;).
I think you should always host your site in the country and with the countries domain that you are targeting - if you are targeting more than one country it would probably work best as a .com hosted in the US or with seperate domains/sites hosted in each of those countries. (Unless you get dupe content penalties of course...)
For example if you could get *exactly* the domain you wanted as widgets.cc, or the diluted option of getwidgets.com, which would be preferable if you were targeting a largely global audience and wanted good google.com serps?
Search on Google.com for "estate agents" (common UK term) and 9 of 10 on the first page are in the UK.
Search for "real estate agents" and 8 of 10 are US and 2 are .au's.
They seem to have the country thing just right to me on Google.com! They have it even better on local country versions.
Where the site is actually hosted seems to be irrelevant. The domain name extension also seems to be largely irrelevant.
a while back I heard something about Google factoring in the location of the server when calculating the SERP.
I believe it was MSN who did (or are doing) this.
Where the site is hosted is relevant to local searches. But is it irrelevant with google.com? So far noone has reported good results here with hosting outside /us/au/uk.
There's one internet marketer that's doing brilliantly in both .com and .ie, but from the site content you wouldn't know it had any Irish connections....
Server location doesn't matter in google
I'd dispute that. I moved my site from a US host to a UK host last July or so and within 3 months by g.com listings had dived and my g.co.uk ones had soared. And on-page changes were minimal and irrelevant to that.
Doesn't matter whether I use .com, .co or .de Googles, or Bigdaddy.
"IBM MIPS z9" is one example. But keyword order is very sensitive - "IBM z9 MIPS" produces different results.
I think this is something ,which is considered to be a factor for MSN
It would be nice if all the SEs adopted an international version (eg google.com), that just displays the results according to best information value, and localised (eg google.be, google.us) versions that incorporated localised factors.
This means that if you are in a country which has incredibly high server space and bandwidth costs such as I am in France ..you are forced to do more work to stay at the top of the page or at least above the fold ..( or pay upto six times the US costs for the same spec server bandwidth etc ) fortunately the MSN page layout means that in most browsers if you can show up at number 7 ( number 5 is always better and most times acheivable ) you are still in view ( I still try for and make the top 3 most times :)..
G with all the in house graphic stuff at the top and the sponsored results etc pushes most times anything below #5 below the fold ..
Y is easier to rank in the top 3 anyway so it doesnt matter ..
Still they all remove searcher choice by doing this ..the default result search from any country should be as wide a return as possible and one should have to option to restrict results to in languge and from country ..not have these imposed as defaults by the SE's
Searching for "portable linux" got a .jp site in the first search results. I search from Belgium, Europe. #*$!? The site is on page 3 for a .com search. Thanks for the local result google.
Does google actually care for non-english countries?
Does google actually care for non-english countries?
Yes they do. I have a site with .nl TLD hosted in the Netherlands and it is ranking at top positions (#1 for several searches with 1,000,000++ results) on google.com as well as google.nl. Content seems more important than location, if the content itself is not region specific.
Same as lammert.
Yes. My site (mostly in english) is .dk hosted here in Denmark. At present its ranking well for several of my keywords/keyphrases on google.com, google.co.uk, google.ca, google.au and of course better on google.dk
web #1 4,950,000
uk #1 356,000
3 word keyword:
web #1 7,130,000
uk #1 674,000
I'm not checking the .com (it redirects to the .co.uk) I'm just checking the Search: web, pages from UK radio buttons. Is that the same thing as checking US vs UK?
Enough inbound links and a good enough quality site will rank #1 anywhere on any TLD.
If you have a site which is geographically specific, it's in googles interest to rank it appropriately on the appropriate geographic version of google. I've no doubt that they are continuously working on that side of their algo.
....still manage to rank high for moderate to higher competitive keywords on google.com.
Yes, I do with my sites where they are the worldwide authority.
I have often found it easier with .com's though. If you want a new site to rank well in both geographic and World google, then I would go for a .com but host in the geographic country (or on a geographic IP).
But once it's reached its authority status it makes little difference.
TJ
If you want a new site to rank well in both geographic and World google, then I would go for a .com but host in the geographic country (or on a geographic IP). But once it's reached its authority status it makes little difference.
That's exactly my experience. I have a .com hosted in the UK. It ranks exactly the same (position 6 - 8) on web searches in the us and the uk and it's #1 on pages from uk.
