Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm new to webmasterworld, so hopefully my post will be welcome!
I'm having a bit of trouble with one of my domains, and hopefully someone has a solution for me.
First of all, I am based in the UK and I have a fairly good knowledge of SEO etc. but this just has me stumped.
Our company has a number of domains / websites that specialise in different areas and about 6 months ago, instead of buying a .co.uk domain & UK hosting we went for a .com domain with a US hosting company as it was considerably cheaper.
4 months later and no rankings for our search terms on google uk (we were ranking on google.com) I did some research and found that the lack of UK rankings may have been due to our site being hosted on servers in the US, and with a .com domain instead of .co.uk, google just presumed it was a US website (even though it has UK in the title tag, throughout the site etc.)
First of all we set our geographic location in google webmaster tools to UK, added our site to google maps, gave it a month, still no google UK rankings.
We decided to bite the bullet and change from our US hosting for our .com to the UK hosting.
After another month our site still doesn't rank on google UK for our search terms. The site comes up when you type the company name, but that's it!
This has me really baffled and wondered if anyone had come across this before or if they had a solution?
We have a decent number of backlinks to the site so didn't want to start from scratch with a new domain, but is that the best thing to do?
Any advice would be appreciated, I realise this is a long-winded post, so I'll just summarise below:
1. .com domain name for UK site, ranks in every other countries version (US, Australia, Russia, Spain etc.....) of google except the UK google.
2. It's hosted on UK servers, has geographic location set to UK has backlinks from UK hosted websites.
3. The site ranks for the search terms in the UK versions of yahoo & msn (I know they have nothing to do with google, just saying they recognise it as a uk website).
4. Our site is built seo friendly, hence the decent rankings in other google countries.
Again, sorry for the long post, but would just like some help! There may be just something simple that I am missing!
Cheers
Mark
A month since your hosting change with no visible change in rankings is not uncommon. You have certainly hit on the important factors.
However, geo-targeting changes, especially those involving the UK for some reason, can take quite a while to be re-set with Google. I would expect more waiting - and when you finally progress in the UK rankings it may well be matched by a loss of international rankings.
With geo-targeting, it's a lot harder to back out of a problem once it has shown up, but it does happen eventually.
What tedster said, plus, i'd check up on is the IP that shows up when you check the site. I've seen sites registered with a US registrar and hosted in the UK fail to be identified correctly as UK hosted. It seems to be another layer of doubt.
Thanks for the replies. I guess I'll play the waiting game then, continue link building in the meantime and see what happens. This site doesn't generate our main income anyway so we can afford to be a little more patient.
@Engine
How would I check the IP address when I'm on the site to see if this is still showing as a US registrar? Not sure how to do this mate.
I have double checked with my current UK hosting company (heart internet, not sure if this makes a difference) and they have confirmed that the site is hosted on UK servers.
I've learnt a very valuable lesson through it all anyway, and think I will stick to .co.uk domains / uk hosting from now on!
Thanks for your help again, really appreciated.
There are many ways to look up the IP, along with the nameservers. It's a .com, so network solutions has a IP lookup tool, of just do a search for IP wesite lookup.
Study the nameservers shown, and the registrar.
HTH
When I check the whois information though, for my .com domain, the registrar shows up as this :
Registrar Domain Name Help Center:
http://domainhelp.tucows.com
Where as with my .co.uk domains I get this:
Registrar:
Heart Internet Ltd t/a Heart Internet [Tag = HEARTINTERNET]
URL: http://www.heartinternet.co.uk
When I've transferred the domain, the registrar for .com domain doesn't seem to have updated to heartinternet. I know transferring of .com domains works differently, but do you think this could be anything to do with the problem?
If not, like tedster said, I guess I'll just have to expect more waiting, unless anyone else has any other solutions that might work?
Cheers
Mark
[edited by: tedster at 4:22 pm (utc) on Feb. 10, 2009]
[edit reason] delink the urls [/edit]
It's not helping, only adding an additional layer. In time, the new hosting IP should be picked up. The problem appears that the IP information is not updated as regularly as site content.
In the meantime, continue to work on inbound UK links, UK keywords and anchors from UK sites and directories.
I don't want to move to a co.uk domain because even though my business is mainely uk I get about 30 % us I guess from what everyone says it is just a matter of time, so I will wait until google uk catches my website...
I hope it won't take more than a month or 2 !
Like you I am baffled to why this would be and I feel my problem to be simular to yours. This makes me think Geo filtering is getting stepped up by G and the UK searches will give priority to .co.uk domains.
I have bought the .co.uk in my domain and I am considering redirecting my .com to it. I have did this on a much smaller and less important site of mine that was a .com and suffered a drop in listing. The new site now lists first page for most keywords. This happened within a 2 week period!
For you if your not ranking well and have low traffic it is worth considering a 301 redirect like I did on the previous site. However, I am afraid to do this with my higher traffic .com incase I upset my traffic flow.
Has anyone else any expeience of this or something simular?
I thought I was the only person with this problem!
I am seriously considering redirecting my domain to the .co.uk version, but we've got loads of good back-links to our .com one, and it would be a shame to loose the power of these links.
member22, I originally set up my .com domain in July 08, but only transferred to UK servers in December 08. I've just changed my nameservers from
ns.mainnameserver.com and ns2.mainnameserver.com
to
ns.heartinternet.co.uk and ns2.heartinternet.co.uk
to try and give it some UK association. I think this is the last thing I can try, unless anyone else has a solution?
I'm going to give it until the end of march, then if I still no UK ranks, just change to the .co.uk domain.
I've learnt a valuable lesson from all this. ALWAYS register your domains and purchase hosting in the UK on UK servers, and just to be safe use a .co.uk domain if it's a UK business.
we've got loads of good back-links to our .com one, and it would be a shame to loose the power of these links.
If you use a 301 redirect from the .com to the .co.uk, then after a period where Google runs some checks to be sure you are not playing games with them, you WILL retain the power of those backlinks.
I have done a 301 direct from within the same domain before, but if you have any info on doing it to change from a .com to a .co.uk that would be appreciated.
Cheers
