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I have a UK based and oriented website. However, it's not listed in pretty much all the SEs when I do a UK secific search (like on Google UK for example).
My site is hosted in the US. Could this be the reason? I was wondering whether they'd look at the IP address, decide it was US based, and then ignore me in the UK results.
Also I wondered if it might have something to do with the
"Content-language" CONTENT="en-GB" tag. I initially forgot to change it to GB from Dreamweaver's deafault of US. Could this be a possible explanation?
Any help appreciated.
Thanks :-)
If you have .co.uk domain you are fine with a U.S. server, however, if you are .com (or anything else) with U.S. server you won't be classified as UK only.
I also have the .co.uk domain (which currently just redirects to my .com domain. I assume I won't be able to get this listed in DMOZ cos it's a redirect, so if I do an optimised keyword page with a jscript/php redirect to my .com domain, would this be considered spam?
Basically I'm worried about not being listed in the UK search as well, since the services on my site are mainly directed to UK visitors.
Thanks again :-)
To put your mind at rest, hardly anyone clicks the 'uk sites only' option! I think it's about 7% of users. Most people just put 'UK' on the end of their search term. So optimise for 'uk' as well.
AOL.co.uk are using google results and filter out ALL .com, even if they have a UK ip address (mad!). So having the .co.uk version up and running is important, especially longterm.
Be carefull not to duplicate your .co.uk page with your .com, and I would just have a hard link sending people through to the main site.
How established is the .com site with links in? If you can, I would divert attention to the .co.uk. Links in to that domain will help optimise for the search term 'uk' as it will probably appear in the linked text (with your domain). It will help with aol and solve the 'UK sites only' problem in google.
Otherwise you could move the .com site to the UK. Can be a painfull process and you might take a slump in traffic while googlebot works it all out.
I don't know about redirects etc... someone else?
Seems like very good advice. One thing I wasn't sure about is what u mean by hard link from .com to .co.uk . Do u mean just redirect all requests to .co.uk from .com? If so, with a javascript redirect?
At the moment my .co.uk is just redirected by the registrar (easyspace) to my .com domain.
The only prob is I doubt I could register my .co.uk with SEs if it's just a redirect by registrar to my .com.
Thanks again for the advice.
