Good Day All,

I had a few queries for the resident UK SEO experts.

I am building a website and optimizing it for the UK market. My questions are as follows;

1. Does the location of the host impact how easily and effectively you can target UK search engines etc (Google.co.uk, Yahoo.co.uk, etc)
2. Is is more beneficial to go after regional based websites as potential link partners - IE: targeting link partners with .co.uk domains and websites?


If any international SEO experts have any comments or suggestions for me I would love to hear.

Cheers

CLIFF

1. Google will often list UK domains hosted overseas in UK-only results, but this isn't always guaranteed. Many people have no problems with having UK domains hosted in the US to appear in UK results, but I have seen where a UK domain is not listed in UK searches despite strong rankings on Google.com - possibly a glitch, but DaveN has also pointed out that for the really competitive searches, the top sites are all based on UK IPs.

2. Google appears to be incresaingly using IP linkage as a factor in UK web search rankings - for example, see this thread:
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=6200

So links from UK IPs and domains could be especially advantageous for targeting UK rankings specifically.

Hope that helps. :)

As I thought I Brian.

Cheers and thanks for the reply..

Critter

Hi

I work for a very popular website (900 000 unique users / month). Most of our visitors (70%) come from the uk market. All of our pages which were indexed in google uk database have recently lost all their ranking and we do not rank any more even on our brand name. The reason for this is because the site is hosted in france (french IP), we do have a.com extension and a .co.uk but the content for these two markets is identical. Google seems to have decided to favourise the.com and therefore we lost all our position on the google uk database. Is there a fix to this bearing in mind we can't change host?

Two options:

EITHER:

Make the .co.uk site your main site and 301 the .com to it.

OR:

1. Make sure your .co.uk domain is parked on your .com and not 301'd or a separate site.

2. Make a site map that points to every single page in your website using the full UK URL.

3. Get a bunch of known UK websites to point towards the sitemap.

Both work fine.

Ian

Two options:

EITHER:

Make the .co.uk site your main site and 301 the .com to it.

OR:

1. Make sure your .co.uk domain is parked on your .com and not 301'd or a separate site.

2. Make a site map that points to every single page in your website using the full UK URL.

3. Get a bunch of known UK websites to point towards the sitemap.

Both work fine.

Ian
Hi Ian

For what I need we cannot point or redirect .co.uk users to our .com website as they offer different services.

I am assuming from what I read that it is best to host our site in the UK and get relevant link partners from .co.uk websites?

Cheers

Critter

I am assuming from what I read that it is best to host our site in the UK and get relevant link partners from .co.uk websites?

YES. That is absolutely the best plan in that case.

Ian

Ian,

Another question. If we have another set of sites, IE a France, Germany, Italy and Japan version of these sites, I am assuming the same holds true in terms of best optimization practices?

I would want to host each of the sites in their respective countries and go after potential backlinks partners with the appropriate extensions (.fr, etc) and target link partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan?

Cheers

Critter

I would want to host each of the sites in their respective countries and go after potential backlinks partners with the appropriate extensions (.fr, etc) and target link partners in France, Germany, Italy, Japan?

That would work really well, but targetting only CC extensions isn't necessary. If a site shows up when you search for UK sites only, then it's a good linking partner for a UK site, regardless of it's extension.

Here is another thing to keep in mind, even though you didn't bring it up - a page can only have one country associated with it, as far as I know. But you could technically have 5 pages in a website considered to be relevant to 5 different countries, in theory. Especially for MSN, Yahoo, and Teoma. Google also looks at links, but it's focus on IP makes it hard to say which localization method it plans to use for a specific site, IMO.

This means that you certainly want to link build within the appropriate community, but of course their is the very practical matter of it's harder to compete if you restrict your linking to a certain local. By having a CC TLD you have a wider range of potential linking partners because you don't have to focus on a certain locale.

I'm not sure what the cutoff is for how many links make you a locally relevant site. I know you can have some links that are not local and it won't hurt you, but I'm not sure where the line is? 20%? 50%? Don't know. :(

The safest bet is to have a local CC TLD - it trumps all other methods. Everything else is more vague (though they work well, they have rules and exceptions).

Ian