.com vs. co.uk: How to rank co.uk higher in UK?

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.com vs. co.uk: How to rank co.uk higher in UK?

cangoou

2:08 pm on Feb 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hello!

We have a company that is selling products in US and UK. We have 2 websites (.com and .co.uk), and we have some unique product-names on both sites.

Our problem: Almost everytime doing a search of a product-name on Google.co.uk, the .com-page outranks the .co.uk-page. Thats a great problem, because all the legal stuff, the shipping-methods and -costs and so on are of course completly different on both sites, and we would prefer that UK-customers see the UK-page first.

Is there a way to tell Google that the co.uk-page is more relevant for UK then the .com-page? The .com-page got more links of course in general (it's just a bigger country), but the .co.uk-page already got a lot more links from UK then from US. But still, the US-page ranks better.

htdawg

2:30 pm on Feb 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

if you sight up for google webmaster tools, there is a link where you can geotarget your domain to a specific country, for example you can set your co.uk domain to show up in the uk results.

rainborick

3:19 pm on Feb 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

You can't set a Geographic Target in WMT on a Country Code Top Level Domain like .co.uk. However, you could target the .com to the United States, which might keep it out of the results in favor of your .co.uk site.

cangoou

3:58 pm on Feb 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thanks for your replys! Doing a targeting via WMT sounds good in general, but we don't want to target the .com only for US but more to "the world but UK" ;-) And this doesn't seem to be possible.

piatkow

4:26 pm on Feb 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

Is the .com hosted in the UK?

cangoou

4:42 pm on Feb 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

The .com is hosted in US.

Simsi

7:40 pm on Feb 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

As a workaround, could you not redirect .com pages to their UK equivalent using geo targetting (so just UK IPs get redirected)? Then it wouldn't matter.

firstconversion

3:22 pm on Feb 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

Host.com in the US, .co.uk in the UK
Put a UK adress in the footer of each page for UK, US address for US page
Build US links to US pages, UK links to UK pages
I always avoid ip geotargeting, its gets messy very quickly.

Yellow_Sun

9:19 am on Feb 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

I completely agree with firstconversion about US links to US pages and UK links to UK pages. In my opinion, that is your best and quickest way to solve your problem.

If you get US links to UK pages just make sure those sites rank well in the UK in order to help your rankings for your UK site.

Best of luck!

TheMadScientist

10:00 am on Feb 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

You might try marking one up as lang="en-uk" an the other using lang="en-us" with proper link relationships in the <head>

Alternate
Designates substitute versions for the document in which the link occurs. When used together with the lang attribute, it implies a translated version of the document. When used together with the media attribute, it implies a version designed for a different medium (or media).

engine

11:21 am on Feb 21, 2011 (gmt 0)

The most likely reason the .com ranks well is because of the links.

Agreed: Hosting .co.uk in uk makes a difference.