Getting more coverage in one country than another

[oliflorence]

Hi,
I have promoted a site for a couple of year into the search engines by exchanging links, adding to directories etc.
The site sells villa rental in Spain and ideally we would like to show well into Google.co.uk, however the owner being based in Ireland the phone numbers on the contact page start with the Irish country code. This is I believe the only reference to Ireland other than the site is hosted in Irealnd.

The site is now doing very well in the .ie version of Google, the Irish version but is a few pages back in the .co.uk

Is this due to the fact that there is more UK sites to choose from or because Google has detected that the site had something to do with Ireland.
Is there any way to change this?

many thanks

[rainborick]

The two primary methods that Google uses to determine geo-location are (1) the presence of a Country Code Top Level Domain name, as in "somesite.co.uk", or (2) for generic domain names (ie. '.com', '.net', '.org', or '.info') the physical location of the server that hosts the site, based on its IP address. They have said in the past that they will also sometimes look at the domain registration data, but that's very unreliable. But they do not look at page content for this information. If you want to be sure that your site's geo-location is set the way you want, there is an option in the Google Webmaster Tools console to do so. Of course, this will only affect Google. The other two major search engines rely on methods #1 and #2 alone.