PR5 site condemned to page 2

[juliemama]

A site I manage is a country tld (ireland), hosted in the UK and targeting both Western Europe and US markets.

The site was launched in 2001, relaunched (just design and content) in July '07, is in a fairly specialized niche with moderate to low competition.

The site has PR5 on the index page and PR4 on sub pages (the services) has significantly more links and better quality links than its SERP competitors but is still stuck on page 2 and page 3 for its major keywords.

All SEO work has been perfectly white hat.

Because of the industry we're in the link building opportunities are few, however we have created a new .com forum for our industry with links back to the .ie domain, which is pretty active and good quality.

Is it possible that hosting the ie. domain in the UK makes such a difference? There are SERP competitors who also have country tld but hosted in their respective countries. We're planning on acquiring a .com but not for a couple of months yet. Finally, and FWIW the site is in top position in Ireland for its keywords.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[AussieWebmaster]

the weighting of sites based on tld is something known but not how much it impacts... links from the country domains would help in those countries

also separating countries by subdomain might help.... use keywords appropriate to country in titles etc.

[beu]

Google makes geographic associations largely based on the top-level domain (e.g. .co.uk or .ca) and the IP of the webserver from which the context was served.

You can help control the country association of your content on a per-domain, per-subdomain, or per-directory level in Google Webmaster Tools but right now you are only allowed a single country. Either way, this may be a good feature for you to keep an eye on in the future!

Also, not sure if you have several pages to target each keyword by geo but, be sure that your "good keywords" in Europe are also "good keywords" in the US. I often see sites where that is not the case.

best of luck to you!:)

[juliemama]

Mucho obliged for your suggestions.

Cheers - J

[glengara]

With increasing regionality in the various Gs ccTLDs are at a disadvantage, I'd go for that .com and 301 the .ie to it.

[phpmaven]

And host it in the USA