Irish website that also sells globally

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Irish website that also sells globally

Irish website in Google

Robinm5

5:59 pm on Jul 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hi, I'm setting up a website for a friend in Ireland. She sells her services locally, but may also create a product to sell internationally. So I'd like to get .ie and .com domains.

My question is, what's the best set-up to ensure maximum exposure in Google in Ireland and Worldwide? For example, should the site be hosted in Ireland with an Irish domain and the .com domain redirected there? If I host it elsewhere under .com and/or .ie will it show up in Google.ie or Google.co.uk searches?

Thanks.

MarkWolk

9:26 pm on Jul 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

A .ie site will always be considered as mainly Irish and may rank poorly on a world level.

A .com site will be considered worldwide only if it is hosted in the US, I think. If done properly, it should rank well everywhere, including in Ireland (except if a searcher specifically requests Irish pages).

Make sure you know where your host is located. Some .uk site owners had recently problems of that kind. They noticed that their sites were nowhere to be found in Google UK, but were doing well in Google Germany. After some research, it turned out that their English host (one of the largest there) had their servers in Germany.

Another warning: if you have both .ie and .com, both sites should have almost 100% unique content. You will run into lots of problems if you simply replicate the site under both tlds.

yves1

9:45 pm on Jul 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

A host in Ireland will help the site rank in Google Ireland. But host location does not influence the rankings in google.com.

IMO you don't need 2 domains. I would go for the .com, because it is more known and better to sell internationally. But really the domain extension has very little to no influence on the google rankings.

A .com hosted in Ireland seems to me the way to go.

glengara

10:24 pm on Jul 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

*A .com hosted in Ireland seems to me the way to go.*

Can't improve on that....

Whitey

11:22 pm on Jul 20, 2006 (gmt 0)

Have a look at this blog by Vanessa Fox at Google. It should answer your question:

http://sitemaps.blogspot.com If you want your site to show up for country-restricted searches, make sure it uses a country-specific domain (such as www.example.com.br). If you use a domain that isn't country specific (such as .com), make sure that the IP address of the site is located in that country.

[edited by: Whitey at 11:22 pm (utc) on July 20, 2006]