Geo-Targeting and hosting a site in multiple countries

[SlyOldDog]

Hi Folks

I have a busy site and we want to host it in multiple locations for SEO reasons. We noticed that even though we rank great in Europe our US content doesn't rank well in the US. This could well be due to the fact the domain is hosted in Europe.

Here are the options I can think of:

1) Serve US content on a US server. Serve rest of the world content on our EU server. Downside: no physical access to US server. Keeping a copy of the US content on the EU server would be buggy. The DB is 50GB

2) 301 US users to US.Mydomain.com and mirror all the content there. However we would be showing Google 2 different URLs with the same content depending on where Google made the crawl from. How should Google treat it in SERPS? Would they be smart enough to index US.Mydomain.com on Google.com and www.Mydomain.com on other Googles like Google.co.uk?

3) Keep all the content on Mydomain.com and serve the US content from US servers. Would Google even notice? After all that is the whole point.

[HuskyPup]

Is the site on a .co.uk or .com?

All my sites also including .asia, .cn, .eu and .in are hosted in the UK.

My .com, .asia, .cn, .eu and .in have absolutely no problems ranking on Google.com, my .eu no problem with Google.co.uk however my .com has big problems with Google.co.uk to the extent I've duplicated it on a .co.uk and it has now started to rank ok on Google.co.uk.

Google seems to have serious problems with geo-location at times, for instance I have a .com for another Indian company from 1998 and for years Google ranked it globally, after all it is a global supply company, then all of a sudden Google decided to knock it out of the .com SERPs almost altogether and now it only ranks in Google.co.in

<slightly off topic>
Furthermore when I check keyword rankings the Chinese have mastered the art of ranking the spammiest of domain names and url structures going with both thin and scraped content. I mention this simply because it may not be you at fault...how does your site fare in Bing?
</sot>

[SlyOldDog]

Hi. Thanks for your reply. It's currently on .com and it ranks well everywhere but .com competitors hosted in the US seem to have an advantage over our site for local US results. eg. "Chicago Keyword".

[HuskyPup]

the US seem to have an advantage

Yep, I seem to see that a lot however I have no idea just how accurate the results are I see.

I use the Firefox Global extension and it seems to provide similar results to proxy searches however I have no idea how much localised results affect my widgets since many-a-time I have tracked-back referrals yet can't even find myself!

I'm fairly confident that there is an inherent advantage in being a US company hosted in the US but as to how much I have no idea and I don't think that G will ever let us know that!

[SlyOldDog]

I can tell you how much advantage they have. Enough for me to care about it :)

What I am hoping for was for someone who did this before to give me an idea of how it might affect how google indexes my site.