OK, so I've launched a new site about 6 months ago (new domain) - for example (fictitious name): www.coolstuff.co.id - and I'm seeing some unusual behavoir on google.co.id in ranks - wanted to know if anyone else has observed algo variances in asia / Indonesia or maybe I've just missed something obvious. It's an indonesian site filled with indonesian language content - language tags are setup right etc.
Coolstuff.co.id is competing in the blue widgets market place, and is optimised for that keyword term and its variants, it has around 10,000 pages in the index, and around 3000 of those are high quality - content rich, unique user contributed listing content, other pages are browsing into a listings structure (its a listings site) or are english language equivalent pages (with language tags setup right) to navigate into listings.
I started putting some articles up on that site after launch of the domain around nov last year, and doing some link building (basic directory listing, social book marking etc) - low value links, but all white hat slow organic approach. I also (around Jan) setup some PR5 and PR4 and PR3 links from various sites I control, off topic, but from quality / authorititive websites. In Feb we launched in the market and starting pouring in lots of user generated listings content (good quality) with all the on page factors setup right.
On to my question/issue: I've noticed that the first 20 pages of the SERPs there for the term blue widgets are filled with:
a) mostly .com domains (not co.id) which I put down to the local market having ".com envy" ie somehow perceiving this is a more international looking site...it's weird they don't target their main local domain for business as you'd expect a geo weighting benefit and;
b) sites with bluewidgets in the domain ie bluewidgets.com, bluewidgeting.com, bluewidgetsarecool.com, bluewidgets2.com etc. are getting very strong favour and filling the SERPs despite their low quality
c) PR0 / very low quality sites (MFA, pure article sites) but often with domains that have reasonable age (much more than my 6 months).
Based on the what I've been doing over the last 6 months and some local indonesian link building, and with the first 100 - 150 results being such rubbish ie (c)- typically I would have expected my site to have started to pop into the top 50 listings at least for the main keyword blue widgets (or at least top 100). My site IS getting "some" ranks but largely is not in the top 150 results for anything but incredibly specific / obscure terms.
Questions:
- do you think indonesian google could be favouring .com somehow because G have noticed that a higher skew % of sites in indonesia use .com and not .co.id (ie not giving geo / relevance weight to .co.id)
- are keywords in the domain name given more weighting in asia ?
- are there ranking factors at play in asia that anyone has noticed that are diff from usual (is age given far more weighting?)
- or am I perhaps the victim of a panda thin content situation or some other factor that I'm just not spotting (I guess I'll never really know that but thoughts on the other items above would be great)
I had (a few months back) some pages with dupe url's to the same (quality) pages but have had canonical tags in place for a while which seems to have solved that in the index. I'm scratching my head why my site with bunch of good links (probably >40 PR3 or above links) and 3000 quality pages, hasn't hit top 200 for most terms when the competition are all these low quality spammy PR0 .com indonesian sites.
Any thoughts would be welcomed.
Phil
