Yahoo Regional Results

Why doesnt my .info site show up in Yahoo UK?

[JudgeJeffries]

I recently paid Yahoo UK for a regional listing of my .info site. I chose .info rather than .co.uk as its a site that's not only commercial but is also full of information. When the Google/Yahoo arrangement started last month my site completely dissappeared from the Yahoo UK regional results which appears to only show .uk domains notwithstanding that I paid the UK rate for UK listing.
Apart from getting a new .uk domain is there anything that can be done to get back into the regional index.

[jeremy goodrich]

No answers from me, as I have very little experience with marketing in the UK market - however, from the sounds of it, the only sure fire cure is another .co.uk domain. :(

From what I understand, it's pretty common 'across the pond' for the engines to filter to UK only results / and then using only the .co.uk domains.

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, as well. Usually, we get answers a lot faster around here - and they'll probably be anothe member along to help out anytime now...Cheers!

[4eyes]

We discussed something similar in:

[webmasterworld.com...]

..dot.info domains appear to be filtered out of the Yahoo/Google results by the regional filter.

I am suprised that it appears to be filtered from the Yahoo UK directory search though.

dot.info is not being handled well by MSN either - the Inktomi UK filter is being classed as non-uk also.

Unfortunately, if you are targeting the UK then dot.info is not a good choice at the moment.

[jmccormac]

Looks like you have been hung out to dry. [1] :) Most of the big search engines have been trying to make money from providing country type indexes for local ISPs. They do this by targeting all websites with the country's cctld (.uk) and sometimes by basing it on where the website is hosted. The result can be a pretty patchy index as it will miss a lot of the websites that are not hosted in that country. The .info tld is still growing - it has about a million domains but I think only about 500-700K websites. It does not seem to feature well in most search engines because it is so small (about the size of a small European country's webspace really) and because sites appearing there are poorly linked or are, in many cases, forwarding to a .com address.

I spidered the complete active .info websites (index page only) last July. There was not a lot of activity and a lot of them were pointing at 'coming soon' webpages. The present generation of search engines tend to have a .com flavour.

Targeting the UK, or indeed any specific country these days would probably require a cctld domain (.co.uk) and a .com or .info. Hosting the site in UK IP space (on a UK host in the UK) would probably also help with the smarter search engines that break down the .com/net/org/info/biz websites on the basis of IP.

The vast majority of referrals that I see on my own servers tend to come from search engines rather than from directories. It may be a good thing to look into Google Adwords or similar unless you are/were getting significant traffic from Yahoo.

Regards...jmcc
[1] Wasn't Judge Jefferies the famous hanging judge in the UK circa 17-18th century?