What percentage click "pages from Australia"

[johnno123]

I am currently reviewing a website for a Local Tourism Organisation in Australia that is a .com site which is hosted in the USA. It therefore doesn't appear at all when the "pages from Australia" option is selected by people living in Austalia.

Australians are the biggest market for this particular destination. Does anyone know what percentage of people searching on Google for information on an Australian tourism destination would choose the "pages from Australia" option?

Johnno

[JohnW]

Johnno, welcome to SEW.

I'm not sure what the percentage is but it almost certainly is enough to matter. If the primary market is in Australia, why don't you move the site to hosting in Australia?

[johnno123]

Thanks JohnW. Your welcome and response is much appreciated.

Yes I am recommending that the site be hosted in Australia however the current webmaster is resisting on the basis that 'only' 14% of people click the "pages from Australia" button on Google.

In my view 14% is already a significant number however I don't know how he came up with the figure and thought that there may be some stats out there that either confirm, or otherwise, that statistic.

Johnno

[Chris_D]

Hi Johnno

Welcome to SEW Forums!

I've never heard an 'official' number quoted for "pages from Australia" boxtickers.

But the mere fact that regional sites get a boost in the "pages from the web' results in regional Googles means it's worth helping Google get the regional recognition right - if that region is your market....

See http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050517-135157 and
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=60

[projectphp]

My question would be: where the heck did he get that number from? Challenge him to prove it. And even then, ask "why miss 14% of people for what ammounts to a minor change?" Unless it costs an extra $10K a year (doubtfyul), it is a nobrainer (IMHO).

Besides that, Google, at each domain, shows slioghtly different resutls evemn if you don;t click "pages from"... I can;t remember the search, but there was one where Blair showe up number one in the .co.uk, but not the .com

BTWL: whilst looking, I did the old miserable failure search, and look at the ad on the right:

Why these results?
These results may seem politically
slanted. Here's what happened.
www.google.com/googleblog

[leadegroot]

Hostng in .au is dearer than overseas, but its not ridiculous.
Budget hosts run from $120 odd, and 'quality' hosting can be $300 - 400
Not ridiculous, but annoyingly dearer (damn that Pacific cable only being paid from our end!!!!)
(Disclaimer: umm, no - nothing to disclaim. I'm a user of hosting, not a seller )

If you have a GTLD that you cannot change to a CCTLD the simplest fix to get your domain appearing in the 'from <country>' results is to move it to in-country hosting.
My experience is that you will pop into the in-country results as quickly as your next index (ie as soon as the page is crawled again, plus a bit to allow for the processing).

Percentages?
Its the sort of figure that is too wobbly to be definable.
Because the 'pages from <country>' radio button is (quite reasonably) not checked by default, the average joe has to specifically think 'hmm, and I should pull that one from the local sites'.
This means it is done on a query by query basis, rather than a one-time decision that will affect them ever after.
It being query-specific makes it difficult to put a number on, even when you have before and after figures to compare.

I can tell you that my experience is that it *is* worth doing.
I have seen site traffic double on Australian specific topics when I moved a gtld domain from overseas hosting to domestic. Notionally, this puts aust-specific queries around the 50% mark, but who knows - maybe some other changes on the sites had an effect that week?

I agree, I would require him to justify that 14% figure.
Or I would say 'we get a *14%" increase?!?!? Lets do it!!!'

[easiserv]

johnno123 - before you get stuck into any of these 'fixes' to your problem, I suggest that you have a read of the Matt Cutts blog entry @
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infras...-january-2007/ - it may be useful to you.

What you've identified in Oz may be exactly the same 'issue' as has been troubling the uk community (and every other non-USA community I suspect) since last August, and filling oodles of space in various forums too. If you read Matt's comments below it's a clear Google admission that they've got something 'not quite right' (it's never wrong is it?) at their end and they're trying to fix it.


Matt Cutts - Infrastructure status, January 10, 2007 @ 9:23 pm

An SEO or two has been holding my feet to the fire about root pages of .com’s that are hosted outside the US. In some (pretty rare) circumstances, you’ll see the root page when you search site:domain.com on google.co.uk for the “search the web” option but you won’t see the root page when you switch to “search pages from the UK”.

I thought we’d nailed this issue in December, but we found another way that this can happen. I believe a fix has been submitted and is percolating its way through the system. Of the ~7 examples that I know of, I believe all but one is working now (and the remaining site is doing a chain of like five 302 redirects to weird/long/deep urls).

However, if you
1) have a .com that is hosted outside the US
2) searching on (say) google.co.uk for [site:yourdomain.com] returns your root page and all your pages for “Search the web”,
3) if you switch to (say) “pages from the UK”, the root page does not appear but the rest of your pages do, then this paragraph applies to you.

I’d wait 4-5 days to let this second change percolate completely into our index, and if you still see the behavior after 4-5 days, please leave a comment with the name of your site.

Right now I’m not expecting any major infrastructure-related upheavals to our rankings. Should that change in the future, I’ll be here to talk about it then.

So my advice to you johnno123 is that before you do anything major at your end - give the Google boys a chance to fix their end. And if that doesn't work for you - you've got Matt's open invitation to drop him a line!

[johnno123]

Thank you for all the responses and advice. We will be moving the site to an Australian based domain soon.

I will post a message here when the site is displayed on "pages from Australia" searches to let everyone know how long it took to propagate.

Many thanks again,
Johnno

[johnno123]

I am pleased to advise that we moved the site from a USA server to an Australian based server on 1 Feb and ... today 7 Feb .... it appeared in the same ranking location (3) for "pages from Australia" when the site is accessed from Cairns.

Thanks all for your help and assistance.

Johnno