4 replies to this topic

[stevenba]

Hi there,

I'm doing some seo for my employer(s) companies in the UK, and i'm trying to target UK visitors, because :

• the products are low volume, high cost (specialist beds costing about US $2000 per unit)
• the products can only be sold and supported in the UK
• any enquiries from outside the UK place a drain on resources

As i undertand, google regionalises by using a combination of tld (co.uk), IP address, domain registrant's address, plus other factors such as language and signs of regions in copy (eg

UK

) .Inktomi does this just by TLD.

The problem i have is i have some good rankings in Inktomi for some .com domains, giving good returns through msn.com, however these are seriously skewed through msn.co.uk search results.

I can see two options for this:

• purchase regionalised TLD (co.uk) and point at site and get this indexed
• submit into regional directories (Looksmart UK) under region specific entries

How will the search engines react when / if they find a co.uk and a .com domain pointing to the same site, and will they penalise this ?

[K.S. Katz]

Yes, you'd probably be penalized by marketing two domains with the same content. It could be implied that you're spamming the search engines.

I would suggest doing the specialty niche directory submissions (i.e. UKSearch.com) for UK related stuff. Make sure that you make it very clear in the tags that this is a UK only site to discourage people outside your demographic from clicking through and draining your resources.

Sincerely,

K.S. Katz

[dragonlady7]

Domains pointing at one IP is ok; multiple websites with duplicate content is not OK. Jill knows all about this-- she has a couple of addresses that all point to the same webpage, and that's fine. She'd know!

[stevenba]

Ta for the reply,

We do put 'UK' into the title, meta and copy already, which works to an extent with google, but not Inktomi. The problem is that international visitors see this, and enquire about international deliveries / support, etc. (I suppose i've answered my own question here - i should set up an affiliate link or exchange links with international sites)

My concern is that i won't see much traffic solely through uksearch - unless you mean doing this as a way to influence the bias on regionalised results ?

I'm trying to target google, msn, and yahoo (by getting good google and inktomi listing, plus overture ppc).

Most UK people search using google.com, and many then filter by adding uk to search string rather than use google UK. This is fine, but msn and the search feature built into IE defaults to msn uk, which filters by TLD i think.

Having a paid inclusion in Inktomi, wouldn't it be best to submit new co.uk URL, and when indexed, remove .com listing using robots.txt or cancel inclusion ? (30 day period for substituting URLs has passed)

Just a point - with multinational companies, such as Ford Motors, how do they get around having regionalised sites while staying within spam guidelines ?

i'm going on holiday for a week so i will not be able to action / reply until then ...

[stevenba]

Thanks for the help.

Just before i went on holiday, i pointed a co.uk domain at the site, and submitted new url to inktomi using positiontech, and all seems fine with rankings.