23 replies to this topic

[AussieT]

G'day!
I have an Australian Accommodation .com website that ranks very well in many SE's (including Google). I have over 200 first place rankings in World Wide Searches.

However I do NOT rank well in Australian Search Engines or (Google - search within Australia). And of course some Australian SE's will not list me at all since I do not have a .com.au domain name

My questions are:

1. What are the best options to pursue so that I can get listed and rank well in Australian specific searches and STILL continue to rank well in World Wide Searches? And of course

2. If I get a new .com.au domain name - what is the best way to avoid having to duplicate all the info. (which I understand in a SE NO NO). Should I keep both sites or drop the .com site after a while?


As a newbie I do not understand all the technical jargon so please be specific and spell out in some detail your solution.

Thanks in advance
AussieT

[mcanerin]

The most common way of doing this is to keep your current .com site as the main one (thus keeping it's rankings, as well) and add a .com.au as a redirect. That way you only have one site, but both domains point there.

Keep in mind that you need a real redirect (at the DNS level) NOT a "fake" redirect like frame forwarding or refreshes. For Apache web servers (most are) it's called a 301 redirect. Your ISP will know what you mean.

If they don't, someone on this forum will no doubt be able to help you, myself included. The exact answer will depend on what web server your host is using, and where and how you register the .com.au domain.

Once we have that info, the rest is easy.

Hope that helps,

Ian

PS Welcome to the forum!

[Jill]

The most common way of doing this is to keep your current .com site as the main one (thus keeping it's rankings, as well) and add a .com.au as a redirect. That way you only have one site, but both domains point there.

I believe you will want to redirect the .com to the .com.au in order to gain the benefit in the australian search engines.

Jill

[mcanerin]

Hi Jill!

Why would that be? I'd like to know because my .ca domain is redirected to my .com site and it seems to be working fine. If I'm wrong I'd sure like to know it now

I've been submitting the .ca to the sites that care about .ca and .com to everyone else, mainly because my .com already has lots of backlinks and it would be a pain to go find them all.

Ian

[qwerty]

It's mostly for the country-specific search on a country-specific version of Google, Ian. As far as I can tell, Google is able to figure out that a site is in the UK based on its IP address, but they seem to prefer sites with .co.uk domains when one does a UK-specific search.

Try this search. It's a query for UK based sites from google.co.uk on the term search engine marketing. Only one of the top ten pages is on a .com domain.

Then again... there's this one, which seems to back up your point nicely.

[mcanerin]

Hey! There I am at the top! Woot! (too bad that page is still under construction - I'll have to fix that quick )

I think there are problems with both ways to figure out country specific sites. It's very common in North America for people to just host wherever they can get a good deal - they don't really pay too much attention to whether the IP is canadian or US.

I wonder what would happen if I hosted my .ca domain on a US host (and IP) ? Right now my .com (and .ca) are both on a canadian host and IP.

My links would tend to support the use of IP for localization, but I think it would be unfair and inaccurate to ignore the .ca.

Maybe you get a certain amount of points for a local IP and a certain amount of points for the country TLD, and then G organises things from there - it wouldn't surprise me, it's similar to how they organise the normal results (page rank)

Of course, that's just Google - a directory may be a totally different thing.

Ian

[projectphp]

Short answer: host the site in Australia. Only option for a .com to be australian site in Google (see ANZ.com, telstra.com etc). That means higher hosting costs, so you will need to weigh up the benefits, but it is probably worth the effort.

Edited by projectphp, 23 September 2003 - 07:09 PM.

[Jill]

Why would that be? I'd like to know because my .ca domain is redirected to my .com site and it seems to be working fine. If I'm wrong I'd sure like to know it now

Because as I understand it, the .ca site wouldn't exist as far as Google was concerned since it has "permanently moved" to the .com site.

Jill

[turbocashuk]

We've been through this issue earlier - I have the same problem. And the answer is if your .com already has standing in the search engines with lots of backlinks, you may as well forget it. The only way for it to work is as Jill says, however, you if your .au site becomes the main one (as it has to), you have to get all the backlinks changed.

It becomes an even bigger problem if you truly want to be global. ie when someone searches the web or a specific country (whichever one it is), you want to come up in all of them. For example my site is for free accounting software which works anywhere. I want to be in yahoo.co.uk, msn.co.za, lycos.co.ca,google.com etc etc but it's just not possible to do that.

[AussieT]

Firstly, thank you all for your replies.

Seems like the Jury is still out on this one.

If I understand your replies correctly, so far 3 options have been suggested.

1. Get a .au site and redirect it to the .com site. (This option would be the easiest but not not seem to have any support)

2. Redirect the .com site to the new .au site. (This has some support but a few downsides. Primarily contacting link partners and arranging for the links to point to the new .au site.)

3. Host the .com site in Australia. ( I would like to hear more feedback on whether you feel this would work.)

It sounds like the lesson in all this is to get a coutry specific domain name and possibly host the site in your own country and not try to save a few dollars by going overseas. I will keep that lesson in mind for my next project.

Tom

[turbocashuk]

Hik AussieT
No 3 won't really work. Even if the domain is in Australia and it's a .com the OZ search engines wont pick it up. A perfect example is my site in the UK. It's a .com and the only .co.uk search engine that picks it up (despite it being hosted in the UK and having a UK IP address) is google.co.uk. Yahoo.co.uk, lycos.co.uk and all the others dont pick it up as it's a .com.

The only way is doing no (2). Make the .au site the main one, rearrange all the backlinks and point the .com to the .au. But then you gotta hope the guys who are linking to you will still link to you when the changes have to be made. They may think, oh that's enough with his site now, let's link to another one rather.

[AussieT]

Hi Turbocaskuk

If I go for option 2 - do I also need to host it in Australia?

PS I have a Google PR of 5 with only 32 backward links (21 of these are my own links) so it will not be too much work to have them changed.

Tom

[turbocashuk]

Better to have it hosted in OZ yes. The hosting fees really are irrelevant in the greater scheme of things - they're hardly gonna break the bank.

If you can sort out your backlinks that's great. But bear in mind when you do this transition, you will drop out the search engines for a while. The .com suddenly will be without backlinks, so it'll drop, while the .au will have to wait to be spidered, unless you pay for inclusion.

Anyone else care to comment on this? I was thinking of doing this myself but realise it's not worth my while.

[Alan Perkins]

1. What are the best options to pursue so that I can get listed and rank well in Australian specific searches and STILL continue to rank well in World Wide Searches?

Host the .com in Australia. Most importantly, make sure the .com primary nameservers are in Australia. Then the site should appear in Google Australia and Google worldwide, as well as other Australian search engines that index .com sites.

2. If I get a new .com.au domain name - what is the best way to avoid having to duplicate all the info. (which I understand in a SE NO NO). Should I keep both sites or drop the .com site after a while?

There's no off-the-peg answer to that one... there are lots of options, all with pros and cons.

[mcanerin]

primary nameservers

Is it the primary nameservers or the IP of the site itself? The answer to this will make a very large difference to me.

My primary name servers are hosted at ZoneEdit - this gives me easy control and 2 servers on different sides of the US. Yes, the US.

However, my site is hosted right here beside me in Calgary (reaches over and pats server). Therefore I have a .com on a Canadian IP with a US nameserver, but I come up right at the top of searches on Google with "Pages from Canada" on for my keywords.

And several of the sites under mine are .ca's that I KNOW are hosted in Canada, so it's not a case of there not being any Canadian sites for the search so G going to the full (international) directory.

Ian