za.net hosted in US -- how to get it into South African Google?

[McClaw]

I am currently running a za.net url on my website.

The website is esentially a South African site,but it is hosted in the states, and the primary domain is hosted in the UK.

Is there any way of telling google that it shoudl include my site in a local search on the google co.za domain?

[GodLikeLotus]

You need to have the site Hosted in SA.

[McClaw]

Unfortunately that is not an optioin because hosting in SA is waaayyyyy to expensive.

is there no meta tag that I can add to tell google that the site is in fact a SA website?

[viggen]

Get plenty of links from ZA sites (domain and/or hosted) and Google will eventually figure it out...

cheers
viggen

[McClaw]

Thanks for the advice, I will try that.

Although, as far as I can tell most of my links are from Za sites in any case...

[WebWalla]

Get plenty of links from ZA sites (domain and/or hosted) and Google will eventually figure it out.

Not if the poster wants the site to appear in the "Pages from South Africa" option. Either a local ccTLD or local hosting is necessary for this.

[Wibfision]

I have been suggesting for ages a location meta tag - I am in a similar position with my website - a .net domain targetting the UK which has to be hosted within the UK to get the UK traffic. From my experience when the site was hosted in the US, no amount of UK links to it made any difference. Moving the hosting to the UK doubled the traffic at the time.

[maccas]

Isn't .za.net a local extension? i.e are all these sites [google.co.za] servers in SA? [za.net...]

[lammert]

.za.net is not an official South African TLD. It is the same as people who registered in the past .uk.co domains instead of .co.uk, thinking they were registering a name in the UK. It happend to be a scam from Columbia instead.

If you want high rankings in South Africa with a server in the US, get yourself a real .za domain.

[McClaw]

>>>If you want high rankings in South Africa with a server in the US, get yourself a real .za domain

Yea, I will eventually, but since my site has only been online for three months a za domain wont make business sense yet.(Not making anough from the site yet)

I'm getting about 100 visitors a day so far so perhaps I should stick with it for the next few months, and see what happens.

[McClaw]

>>>I have been suggesting for ages a location meta tag - I am in a similar position with my website - a .net domain targetting the UK which has to be hosted within the UK to get the UK traffic. From my experience when the site was hosted in the US, no amount of UK links to it made any difference. Moving the hosting to the UK doubled the traffic at the time.

A Location or country meta tag might not be a bad idea in any case, I will add it, just for fun ;)

[lammert]

Staying with a .za.net domain until your sites starts making enough money and then switching to a .za domain is a dangerous action. Google will see the .za domain as a totally new one with all the known effects as sandboxes etc. Even properly setup 301 redirects from the old to the new domain can make the site invisible for some months. This will cost you probably more in the long run than switching to a .za directly.

Although I must be honest, I don't know what they are charging for a .za domain and I know some country domain extensions which are so expensive that I also would think twice before registering such a domain.

[Shanada]

I've been planning several sites that target the SA market, and this is a problem i've run into as I'm wanting to host my sites in Germany. How would registering a .co.za domain and pointing it at the site affect things? Would Google eventually click that the site is South African or would it lead to duplicate content penalties

[McClaw]

One of my other sites are co.za and is hosted in the US, it shows up in the local search on google, so it seems that as long as you have a recognized SA url (co.za, org.za, etc..) you will show up in local searches

[tedster]

registering a .co.za domain and pointing it at the site

Use a domain level 301 redirect and there should be no duplicate troubles. Any other "pointing" method, including a 302, can lead to big troubles over time.

Whether that will be enough to tip the site into the country specific search is an interesting question. It might, but I haven't seen it tried. Google does use a number of factors, including location of server, the tld, the regular mention of a location on the pages, and (some say) the location of the registrar. The presence of the lang attribute for the html tag may also help -- <html lang="en-za"> and getting links from .co.za sites also comes to mind as a worthwhile endeavor.