How Does Google Differentiate Between UK and NON UK Sites?

[spidross]

Hi

A friend of mine runs a website business. Just lately he has seen that if he searches through google.com with the radio button "search the web" his website comes in the top 1-2 results, if he searches again with pages from the uk selected he is way down the list. This has only just happened and he did enjoy the top spot in both searches for a long time. it seems that google has changed the way searches are done when using pages in the uk/ the web radio button. He has a .com website based and hosted in the UK

My question is does anyone know how google searches and how it differentiates between uk only pages and rest of the world?

Does it work on the server that host his website's IP address? Or is it to do with whats in the keywords that google searches for.

If either the above how do you get yourself back to he top of the uk search when you have a .com website

The website is www. radiatorshowroom.com, it is in the number one spot for sponsored links on both searches (uk only pages/ the web) and also used to be number one in both uk/ the web searches after the sposored links

Cheers for the help in advance

[rainborick]

All 3 major search engines use 2 criterea for geo-location. (1) A country-code Top Level Domain Name (CC TLD), or (2) the location of the server that hosts the site, based on its IP address. Even the standard searches in Google where the user doesn't press the "sites from xxxx only" button are heavily influenced by geo-location, so its almost imperitive to either get hosted in the target country or get the CC TLD. Good luck!

[spidross]

Many thanks for such a swift reply, am not the best with this thing and am only helping him out. But is the CC TLD the .co.uk for the website?

If so he also owns the www. radiatorshowroom.co.uk address, can he just put a redirect page to the www. radiatorshowroom.com website or is that not allowed?

[rainborick]

If he wants his site to be considered to be located in the UK (and if the UK is his target market, he certainly does), he either needs to use the .co.uk domain name or have the site hosted on a server that is located in the UK.

The www. radiatorshowroom.co.uk currently does a server code 302 redirect to www. radiatorshowroom.com[/url]. This can cause problems in the search engines and needs to be changed. If you're going to use redirects at all, it should be a code 301. Your hosting service should be able to tell you how to do this.

Since the site is completely designed around the .com domain name, its probably best to use that as the primary domain name. Just be sure that the site is hosted in the UK. If you don't know, ask the hosting service. Don't assume that because the hosting service's domain name ends in .co.uk that their servers are in the UK. Apparently at least one UK hosting company hosts elsewhere in Europe.

As I say, set up a code 301 redirect for all requests for pages from the .co.uk domain to point to the .com domain. Do your best to locate any links that point to the .co.uk domain and get them changed to the .com domain on your own site(s) as well as the sites of any link partners. Then leave the .co.uk domain alone. Make no effort to promote its existence whatsoever. Good luck!

[spidross]

Many thanks mate

Will pass along those gems of wisdom when i speak to him tomorrow, but can i ask a stupid question what is the difference between a 301 request and a 302 request?

once again many thanks for your help

[rainborick]

Code 302 means "Moved Temporarily". It implies that the resource being requested may someday be again available at the original URL/address. This squishy status has led search engines to treat code 302s in a variety of ways, sometimes causing great harm to the rankings of the domains involved.

Code 301 means "Moved Permanently". It means that the requested resource has a new location and you can forget the old/original URL. Search engines do a much better job with 301's, including a transfer of link popularity (or PageRank in Google's case) from the original URL to the new URL. Even more importantly, a code 301 redirect prevents the search engines from considering the two URLs as being duplicates, which can be a big problem for your rankings.

Many hosting services that use Microsoft IIs server software seem to automatically use a 302 when a user requests a domain be redirected, and its often a challenge to convince them that the difference is very important to you, so if this is your situation, be insistant about the 301. If you're on a host that uses Apache server software and allows you to use an .htaccess control file, you can easily set up the proper redirect yourself. PM me and I'll send you instructions.

[Stevelegh]

Hi Moderator,

Please can you remove this thread.

I am the webmaster of www. RadiatorShowroom.com and this thread is causing Google to prefer the .co.uk url pointing to this site, which it would appear has been followed from this thread.

As a result, my #3 ranking for the keyphrase designer radiators with the .com url has disapeared and the .co.uk is listed halfway on page 2 due to the lack of IBL's

We will now be removing the 302 as the loss of traffic through mistypes will be far outweighed by the amount of traffic gained from our intended url.

Many thanks for the members contributions by posting.

If you could give this your most urgent attention.

Many thanks in advance

[JohnW]

stevelegh, I took out the links.

[Stevelegh]

Many thanks

Hopefully this will help resolve things...........

Cheers

[Stevelegh]

Just to redress the balance I've put a link on this post.
http://www.RadiatorShowroom.com Hopefully, this'll help to fix things.

I hope this is OK

Cheers

Stevelegh

[Stevelegh]

Hi there,

Just a request for some advice / reassurance.......

Google has binned my .com in favour of my .co.uk 302 redirect (see sorry story above) so I have put a 404 not found on the .co.uk in the hope that Google will remove it and revert to the .com index page.

I'm finding that people are in fact returning to the .co.uk page after finding the site via Google search. Hence I am losing traffic.

I don't want to put a redirect on the .co.uk of any kind as I don't want to attract the same problem again, so is it possible to put a special request in to Google to drop the .co.uk or similar.

Alternatively, if anyone has any idea how long it will take Google to drop this 'dead' page, it'd probably help me to sleep tonight..........

[JohnW]

It's getting hard to understand what you are trying to do but if I understand this correctly, you want the .com to be the website that is used, but want it to show up in Googles UK results.

If that is the case, rainborick has it right - you need to use a 301 redirect from .co.uk to .com, and, move the hosting of the .com site to a UK host.

[Stevelegh]

301 it is then.............

The idea behind putting a 404 on the .co.uk was to tell Google to drop this from the index.

In hindsight, this was probably a little petulant on my part.

A 301 will be doing the same thing and still giving me a presence on the serps until Google sorts this.

Cheers for the help.

[Stevelegh]

Just a quick line to say that things are resolved with a little added juice as I'm now #2 for my keyphrase.

Many thanks John W

Cheers