Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The problem domain being catering for an international english speaking audience across many countries and performing well in each of googles geo-targetted search engines.
Now a couple observations; I have my website (which caters for a number of english speaking countries ~10) hosted in the US and am ranking in the top 10 (even no 1) in both Y & Live (G is a little bit behind top 30/80) for a couple of my keywords/phrases in the US or on google.com. The domain I use is a .com. Now evidence points to the fact that the IP address of your server plays a prominent role (how prominent I don't know) in your geographic search engine positions. I think this is best evidenced by the no 1 position in Live and higher position in google.com than in google regional. It seems that Y does not really take into consideration your server IP address as much as G and Live do.
Lets talk about google a little bit more...
Google.com I am ranking some 100-200 places higher than my regional target country (I'll come back to my target country - as it is only my target country for the shorter term).
My target country has a stronger back link profile from sites in this location (Let's say aprox 60% links are from this location). In googles webmastertools I set the geotarget to my target location - I feel it makes no difference after weeks of waiting.
There is the same case for live, except on an even greater scale no 1, top 10 in .com?en=US and in the hundreds for my target location.
As I mentioned before Yahoo seems to take a look at the back link profile a little more, and place a lot less weight on ip address and server location. I am ranking very high in both yahoo.com and yahoo regional.
My whois information is in my target location with the domain name servers in the US.
I have and own the domain names for all my english geographic targets. They are just doing permanent redirects to the .com.
To make things more interesting I have a back link profile from many of the english speaking countries albeit not as strong as my current target location. The content is not targeted towards any specific location at this stage - it has reference to all throughout the website in the footer. This may confuse google?
We are talking about google, because 100% of referral traffic comes from google and they own the market, even though I am clearly performing better in the other two search engines.
Now I know a possible solution to this problem is to geographically host your website in x locations but this is not practical.
I earlier mentioned that my target country is only in the shorter term - 12 months. I say this because at some stage it will take its own country level domain name (and the .com will target the US market more heavily) remembering that the .com is what I am using now with a strong backlink profile from my target location.
Changing the content and server location for my target location at this stage is not practical because it would effectively take the other locations out of play.
So the question ultimately comes to strategies for geotargetting my target country for the short term whilst not jeopordizing my work of 12 months for the rest of my english speaking audience.
We want my target country performing great in the short term as it should if it was hosted in the target location, but at some future stage it will take on its own regional domain name and the .com will be used for the US.
I have the option of using my 10 domains from the same server on different ip's in the US, and updating the content for each domain that reflects the location.
Another thought I had was just using the .com and having strong link profiles from all locations - or would this just confuse the hell out of G and net effect be you are somewhere in the middle everywhere.
What do you think I should do at this stage, I have some difficult decisions to make. I hope you can relate and reflect on this long post with me.
The challenge you face is that Google's handling of geo-targeted results is most definitely a changing affair in recent times - especially since the introduction of the Webmaster Tools targeting [webmasterworld.com] afew months back. In a complex plan such yours, it's very difficult to give any advice and hope it will be correct after 12 months.
My own preference would be to start with the target country's TLD from the start, rather than try to repurpose a year or so later. I don't think that's a realistic goal.
Let us delve a little further.
My .com which is targetting a geographic location more heavily now has already had a good 9 months work put into it to get where it is today.
I have been thinking about your suggestion of using seperate domain names for each of the target location for some weeks now (realistically it will happen across the same server in the US) - and then geographically target with G's webmaster tools (Have you made any observations with this tool as my experiences thus far have no conclusive evidence of any changes). The problem with this solution is that it is very much a subscription oriented service, this means that the level of content differentiation will be minimal during the early stages of the partition, this changes dramatically after content is generated by the users of the seperate geographic locations (However I predict that this may take many months for some of the locations). So there is some concern about similar content, term, conditions, disclaimers, how it works will all be essentially the same. The content differentiation comes within the subscription area and as I mentioned previously will also become public facing to users and the spiders some months down the track.
I am considering the following course of action; maintain the .com targetting my location as it has, plus partition for the other locations and also a regional domain partition for my target location.
So for some time in parralel the .com will have no location specific content as is the case now and my series of newly partitioned regional domains will have a location specific domain extension and minimal content differentiation that is also specific to the location.
The .com will cater for every location as it currently does albeit with some heavier focus on my current target location. The .com will also redirect user's to their regional domains when the hit the .com based on their ip, much like our friend G does now. At some stage the regional domains will have enough strength to perform well in their regional search engines with back links from their respective locations. This should be a little easier as regional search engines are generally less competitive.
When this is achieved we can let the .com target the US market exlusively.
But in reality this will not really have any quick fix to reach my target audience more readily in the short term (which is what would definitely happen if it was hosted in the same location)
This is more likely a 12 month proposition.
Now I also understand that the term authority site is thrown around (essentially a website that is the top dogg and rules all search engine positions because of its size, age, back link profile ect - is this a fair description?)
My website is only provided on regional levels, no other organisation targets audiences on a more global level as I have. If they do it is again through regional domains. Is there a possibility of becoming the authority site and performing very well across the board of geographic search engine results with such a strategy that focuses exclusively on the .com?
What are your thoughts about the above strategies.
Again many thanks for your input and feedback.
