Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
I do not believe so.
I own a company in the USA and a company in the UK with exactly the same names. One is somecompany, Inc., and the other is somecompany LTD. One has the domain somecompany.com and the other somecompany.co.uk.
USA is hosted in Texas, the UK is hosted in London, by the same hosting company which has multiple data centers.
When I search for "somecompany" at google.com or at google.co.uk I get the same results....the USA company first, then the UK company site. This happens when located physically in both the USA and UK.
It appears to me that links win over physical location of either the host or user. The .com definitely has better links and PR, if there is a local bias it isn't sufficient to outweigh the other factors in their algo :)
I do not believe so.
I own a company in the USA and a company in the UK with exactly the same names. One is somecompany, Inc., and the other is somecompany LTD. One has the domain somecompany.com and the other somecompany.co.uk.
USA is hosted in Texas, the UK is hosted in London, by the same hosting company which has multiple data centers.
When I search for "somecompany" at google.com or at google.co.uk I get the same results....the USA company first, then the UK company site. This happens when located physically in both the USA and UK.
It appears to me that links win over physical location of either the host or user. The .com definitely has better links and PR, if there is a local bias it isn't sufficient to outweigh the other factors in their algo :)
It also certainly is the case in foreign-language Googles that there are subtle differences in ranking when searching in English to the main Google .com, and it often appears that there is a geo element in those changes (or maybe its just a different datacenter and my tinfoil hat is sitting crookedly).
Whether those are also apparent in the UK Google, I will leave to webmasters who specialise more in that area.
If anyone knows a good UK Linux host offering reasonably priced shared managed hosting facilities I'd love to hear about it! I currently use hosts on Germany and the US which are good and cheap, but I think that if it is true that SEs are sensitive to locally hosted sites, I should be able to offer this to my clients.
The message that I am getting is that it is definitely better for sites that are targeting UK customers to have a .co.uk domain name, and that it also helps if the site is hosted on a UK server. However this is just hearsay, albeit from supposed experts.
According to Google;
They determine location by:
Physical hosting location
The site's IP address
The WHOIS information
and its top-level domain
So, it would be safe to say that if all the criteria referenced the specific country and locale of the domain owner, then Google and other indexes would be able to accurately determine the "local search" listing.
I would say that using a .co.uk is sensible if it's an option (some people are too far down the line to change).
I've seen many variations, but your best bet is to not take any chances: take simple steps to make it easy for the search engines to see that you are UK based.
