Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've operated a .com website for four years, the site is hosted in the UK.
However a peculiar geographical ranking issue has caused me much hair pulling since the site was launched.
Essentially, I'm a UK based business but offer recruitment services to companies worldwide for a particular industry sector. However when I search on google.co.uk for a selection of phrases related to my site it always seems to be ranked lower than when searching on google.com.
For some the difference is only a few places but for others it is 60 / 80 places different.
When I search for a particular phrase on google.com the site is listed in position 9, but the same search on google.co.uk sees it listed in position 81. However on some other searches the site may be listed in position 2 on google.com and 3 on google.co.uk. I would equate the search phrases as equally competitive and there doesn't appear to be any pattern.
I've read through some related forum postings and note the importance of UK hosting for a .com domain - the site has been hosted in the UK on a dedicated IP since launch. Hosted with a leading UK hosting firm and have checked the IP is a UK ip and the server is hosted in a London datacenter.
The site also has a good number of links from UK sites which haven't been cultivated, the links have just developed over time.
I cannot find any logical answer to why this might be happening. Can anyone else shed any light?
The only other thing, is I have an adwords account, but when I signed up I signed up of the US$ account rather than going through google.co.uk - could this be the issue? But I believe there is no link between adwords and the organic listings?
Any advice much appreciated.
When I search for the company name on pages from the UK, it ranks it no1 (home page), so doesn't appear to be that google is not determining it as a UK site, its just it ranks it lower on google.co.uk for a large number of search phrases related to the site.
For instance a search on google.com for a phrase related to site 'z jobs', (z being the industry sector the site specialises in)
google.com - page 4
google.co.uk - page 28
google.co.uk (pages from the UK) - page 32
This is what I find really strange, google seems to determine the site as UK based as it appears when searching on google.co.uk pages from the UK, but considerably lower than on the .com, it's as though the results should be the other way around. The more filters applied the lower it appears?
On other searches such as 'z jobs in x' - (with x being a location) I have various location pages which list jobs in that area - the results for most appear to work correctly
google.com page 1 position 5
google.co.uk page 1 position 4
google.co.uk (pages from UK) page 1 position 2
Any ideas?
