Trouble ranking in different country specific results

[vampke]

Hi,

I have a fairly popular non-english website, let's say it's about widgets.
The Url would be something like widget.aa, aa being a country specific tld.
I score very high in the google.com (top3) and google.aa (1st) engines for the search term "widget"
Unfortunately I cannot be seen in the first 50 pages of the google.bb engine for the term widget. (bb being a country having the same language as the country aa).
It is very illogical that google would consider the information extremely relevant for people in aa and around the globe, but not for people living in bb...

Has anyone else seen this? How can I resolve this?

[tedster]

This is a common situation with a country code TLD (ccTLD). Your site's popularity needs to attract many links from other countries to change that - or ideally, move it to a generic domain TLD rather than a country code.

[thirteen]

You need to have a sister site with a country selector on both site. Google has said that they take many signals into account and 2 of those signals are Server Location and Country Code.

You can create a duplicate site and host it in bb country and/or purchase a domain name widget.bb to get increase your Google search ranking in bb country.

You will also need to use canonical link to point to your main site to avoid Panda Duplicate content penalty.

[vampke]

thanks for your answers guys, I did not know the canonical link attribute yet.
Problem is that widget url's are quite popular, so not many good domain names are left...
Anyhoew: I did notice a related thing with another site: this is a company website that has both companyname.aa and companyname.bb. The company is located in .aa and companyname.bb is just a homepage, 2 or 3 underlying pages and all the companies widgets pages are linked back to the .aa page.
The very weird thing is that searching for companyname on google.com will have the .bb site 1st. The only links I can find to the .bb site are all coming from the companies other websites, while the .aa site has more inbound links (also from other sites) and higher PR.
Apparently google considers .bb to be more important than .aa?

[thirteen]

You use canonical link to tell the search engine which webpage is more important. The canonical link specifies which webpage is the original content and all the other pages will be duplicates.

[tedster]

To understand the canonical link element best, I think we start by understanding that there is no technical definition for the word "page". So we're talking about the "canonical URL."

The canonical link was created so that your content can declare "this is the URL that is my exact URL. If you got to this content via some other URL, do not use it - use the canonical URL instead."

However, I don't see how the canonical link could work in this kind of country-specific situation. in country bb you want example.bb to be the source and in country aa you want example.aa

[shazam]

The sad truth is that if you truly want a chance at ranking for any competitive keywords you will have to buy a server in that country.I've done it many times and have seen traffic and conversion rates skyrocket. Dealing with support and setting up accounts can be a nightmare, but it really does make a difference at least for now.

You still may not do very well with the organic results being pushed off the page. These days, it's starting to look like you will also need to rent some office space in that country/city to get listed on places but that's another story, another thread.

[Leosghost]

The sad truth is that if you truly want a chance at ranking for any competitive keywords you will have to buy a server in that country.

Precisely..and then get links in that language from other sites in that country..

NB.You don't need to buy a server ..you do need to be hosted in your target country.

[vampke]

The sad truth is that if you truly want a chance at ranking for any competitive keywords you will have to buy a server in that country.

As I said before:

The very weird thing is that searching for companyname on google.com will have the .bb site 1st. The only links I can find to the .bb site are all coming from the companies other websites, while the .aa site has more inbound links (also from other sites) and higher PR.
Apparently google considers .bb to be more important than .aa?

note that both sites are hosted in country .aa