Not ranking in pages from UK - page 7 or 8 otherwise

[adipkn]

I have a website which ranks in 7th or 8th page in google.co.uk for a competitive term. But the same site can not be found anywhere with the google UK filter on. My domain has co.uk extension and is hosted in the UK.

Is this some sort of a Google penalty? If so, then how do i get out of it? Thanks in advance.

[Bones]

If you haven't done so already, it might be worth double checking with the hosting company that the server is actually physically located in the UK. Or perhaps do a bit of detective work on it's IP address.

Have you also tried using the "set geographic target" feature in Google Webmaster Tools?

[adipkn]

Yes, i have done that. the IP is very much in the UK. Also, i have set the my target audience as UK (from google webmaster tools). All this was done 3 - 4 months ago. Still same problem persists.

[Bones]

Are your inbound links mostly from non-uk sites?

Welcome to WebmasterWorld by the way! :-)

[steve]

If possible add to every page:

Address - street, town, postcode, UK
Phone and fax numbers - +44 (#*$!x) #*$! #*$!
VAT no.
Company registration no. #*$!#*$!x registered in the UK

Also try a link to google, yahoo, msn maps etc.

Link out to a few local sites in your neighbourhood, local newspapers, companies you use local shop, printer, garage. Then your county, etc. Then a few UK sites, perhaps relevant .gov.uk's?

Try to get a few inbound links from related UK sites and keep your fingers crossed!

Oh and use UK spelling, its colour not color!

[adipkn]

Bones and Steve,
I have tried every single solution you have mentioned. That is why i am perplexed at the result. I tend to think it to be kind of a Google filter (glitch?) but can not figure out what or why.

[glengara]

You checked to 1000 in the "Pages from the UK"?

[adipkn]

glengara, just checked - sitting pretty at 250 :( This is crazy

[glengara]

So we're now talking 70/80 in "search the web" and 250 in "PFUK"?

[Bones]

Title of the thread says "first page". Is that only google.com or something then?

[adipkn]

Yes, glengara, thats it.

Sorry - i should have made it clear. My site is on 7th or 8th page, that is sometimes at 75 - 76 and sometimes at 82 - 83, not 7th or 8th on the first page.

btw, i had a different title for this post which was edited by mods, hence the confusion :)

< My apology. I made another edit,
trying to clarify the thread. -Ted >

[edited by: tedster at 5:53 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2008]

[glengara]

That 80/250 is strange in that it's usually the other way round, 80 in PFUK/250 in web search.

Still, if the site has just popped in it may well move up..

[pxc433]

See this topic:

[webmasterworld.com...]

The same thing has happened to us but not so drastically. We are no longer front page in the UK but are in the US, Australasia, South America and (oddly) non English countries like Germany and Netherlands.

We are a UK company and our market is the UK.

Right now, I'm getting sales enquiries I can't do anything with but none from the UK.

The change happened about 3 weeks ago, maybe a bit longer.

I don't think we have any kind of penalty, because why would we be served up like this (in position 2) in important markets like the United States if there is a penalty?

Like you, our IP address is UK and we show-up in 'pages from the UK' searches.

My take is this: we don't have enough links from the UK. We're in the tech field and have links from all over. Where we've got good links from (like the US) we rank well

[pxc433]

Something else I just noticed.

If you enter our company name into Google.co.uk, you just get our hope page - no site links.

If you enter our company name into Google.com (using a US-based proxy so you have a US IP address) you get lovely sitelinks helping visitors to navigate our site.

Remember we are a UK based company with a UK IP address...

So for me it's pretty conclusive, it's simply about where our links come from. It's like the weighting given to link source has been increased in determining how you rank.

[glengara]

"My take is this: we don't have enough links from the UK."

Hadn't thought of specifically UK links helping a .co.uk in PFUK rankings but it sort of makes sense, on G.ie a site with few Irish links and with pages ranked down to 9 in PFI will still be the first Irish result shown in "web search".

[djmick200]

Something else I just noticed.

If you enter our company name into Google.co.uk, you just get our hope page - no site links.

If you enter our company name into Google.com (using a US-based proxy so you have a US IP address) you get lovely sitelinks helping visitors to navigate our site.

I spotted this problem only yesterday. The listing to an internal page that normaly sits #2 was the only page showing for my company name search on google.co.uk

Today I now have two internal pages showing, no homepage or sitelinks. This is only happening on google.co.uk

I had a few friends spread across the globe check this and all is well everywhere else, homepage #1 with sitelinks and usual #2 internal page.

Sorry for going off topic but perhaps google.co.uk is experiencing a few bugs.

[tedster]

We've got a thread about this: Google Adds Sitelinks for a New Batch of Websites [webmasterworld.com] this past week. One report even even sees Sitelinks on the SERPs but not yet in Webmaster Tools, so I'm not surprised to hear that it's no rolled out to google.co.uk at this time.

[djmick200]

Tedster, what I'm saying is that my site has had sitelinks for quite sometime, now they are now missing and so is my homepage. Only on google.co.uk