Dropped From Uk Search Since Hosting Moved, I have read other threads but still confused Options

[1dmf]

Hi,

I moved my site to the missus hosting , which happens to be USA located servers.

Now when I do a search and put 'UK Only'; my pages are excluded.

I live in the UK , though it's not a UK aimed website and my TLD is .org

I also enjoyed better 'UK Only' rankings vs 'All Web'.

Is there anything I can do about this?

And before people suggest moving host again, that aint gonna happen, plus the .co.uk version of my domain is not available either.

Am I stuffed?

[davidbrett]

My understanding of this is that you either need to be hosted in the UK or have a .co.uk domain to be featured in the from uk filter.

That is what I am seeing with irish sites and .ie domains.

I could be wrong through.

[piskie]

If the domain is Not UK specific such as .co.uk or .org.uk for example then UK Located Hosting is required. However there is Google Geo Location Tool but that is not 100% and it also doesn't help the other search engines.

I would not hesitate and move it to UK Located hosting forthwith. The cost penalty of UK Hosting versus other places is not as hefty as it used to be and I find service to be very good. My host has 24/7 Live Chat and 0800 support to go along with excellent and cost effective packages.

They are around in the UK if you look for them and the pounds saved by going over the pond is frequently lost (and more) by loss of UK SE referrals and revenue.

[Gerry White]

My understanding of this is that you either need to be hosted in the UK or have a .co.uk domain to be featured in the from uk filter.

That is what I am seeing with irish sites and .ie domains.

I could be wrong through.

Fraid so - webmaster tools is your friend here I think, you CAN get a .com or something similar which is hosted in the US to be considered a UK based domain, but I am not sure how - I have recently reccomended to a client who wanted to get served up in the results in the UK market (predominantly Australian market) to do the following.

- Buy a .co.uk
- WHOIS - to the UK based office
- Use UK based hosting
- Make sure the address in the footer is UK
- Make sure the phone numbers are UK
- Server time and format are UK

Use Centre not Center and wear your pants on the inside ...

I am hoping that it will work for him, but I am truly just guessing, Google so far has got all our sites to be UK based...

Finally Google webmaster tools will tell you where it thinks your site is targetting...

[1dmf]

I would not hesitate and move it to UK Located hosting forthwith. The cost penalty of UK Hosting versus other places is not as hefty as it used to be and I find service to be very good. My host has 24/7 Live Chat and 0800 support to go along with excellent and cost effective packages.

As i said piskie this is not going to happen!. The cost penalty is massive for me, i'm using the missus hosting thus it costs me nothing, if I get UK hosting it will cost me money. No discussion, it's staying on USA servers.

- Buy a .co.uk

as i already said to this one, the .co.uk domain name is not available.

WHOIS - to the UK based office

Who's office, but i'm the registrar and it is registered to UK , so I can confirm that doesn't work.

Use UK based hosting

not going to happen.

Make sure the address in the footer is UK

no! there is no address on the site, i'm not a limited company so there is no legal requirement to put my address on the site, do you plaster your home address all over your website?

Make sure the phone numbers are UK

same as above

Server time and format are UK

don't have control over this, it's shared hosting and some people probably do have USA websites, you can't mess with a server time and date stamp in a shared hosting environment, if there is a time issue you have to deal with it with code before displaying the page.

I guess the answer to my question was as I thought 'Yes! I'm stuffed'

This post has been edited by 1dmf: Apr 1 2009, 03:59 AM

[icecape67]

As i said piskie this is not going to happen!. The cost penalty is massive for me, i'm using the missus hosting thus it costs me nothing, if I get UK hosting it will cost me money. No discussion, it's staying on USA servers.

have you tried asking your hosting company if they have data centres in the uk? i have a uk targeting website hosted in an american provider and got no problems as its site is actually hosted on a uk data centre

[1dmf]

have you tried asking your hosting company if they have data centres in the uk? i have a uk targeting website hosted in an american provider and got no problems as its site is actually hosted on a uk data centre

now there's a thought! They have a very good 'live support' system, and they get back pretty quick to open support tickets, so I guess it won't hurt to ask!

It could require them to move the hosting package to different server to facilitate this and that is likely to require me to upload the entire site again, unless they can migrate, that would be rather a headache due to the amount of data all the music files take up.

good thought though, I'll ask them.

[Randy]

When all else fails... wait for Ian. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lol.gif)

You see Ian is our reigning expert in the Geolocation field, to the point that he's even been developing a rather ingenious service to provide an IP Geo Targeting to businesses on the web. I have no idea what the status of this is currently, if he's gone public with offering the service yet or not. But I do know it works from having followed the developments he's made available over the last year or two. So hopefully Ian will drop by to give us an update.

As another possible option, one I wouldn't have thought of quite frankly, Ian made a post recently that indicates that you may be able to use any old ccTLD in combination with Domain Parking and the relatively new Canonical Tag to get the search engines to recognize your .com Global TLD is really a ccTLD. Even without having the .com hosted in the target country.

It's a short post, but reading between the lines a bit it makes sense. If I read between the lines correctly that is. Hopefully Ian can confirm this since I'm sure he's tested it and I haven't. The process looks like it would end up:

1. Buy a ccTLD in the country you'd like to target. The domain name doesn't matter as it won't be seen in the SERPs, just the ccTLD part.
2. Park this ccTLD on top of your gTLD (or normally .com) domain, wherever it's hosted.
3. Set up a plain old html site map for the ccTLD to list/link to all of the parked pages.
4. Edit the html code to add in one of those new canonical tags, pointing to the .com version of the pages.
5. Sit back and wait for the search engines to spider everything.

Apparently what ends up happening is the ccTLD convinces the engines that the parked site belongs to your targeted country. But the canonical tag reference convinces the engines that the .com is the version you want to show up in the SERPs. Thus even though the .com gTLD pages get listed, they also end up getting the additional ccTLD designation.

Brilliant, though a bit convoluted.

[1dmf]

bit conveluted, you're not kidding.

I do have a .co.uk domain gathering dust, well redirecting at present, so I could use that...hmmm. Maybe there is away without moving hosting or even server after all.

I've done the GWMT geolocation thing in the settings, don't know if there is a time delay for effect or if it will make a difference.

I'll try the ccTLD method you mention and see if it helps. The problem is I am targeting the world, but have better ranking for UK Only and now I don't even show up with UK Only, which many of us in the UK use, because alot of the time we are looking for a company or service based in the UK and it helps to filter out the non-UK websites, but contrary to G!'s beleif this has no relevance to your TLD or server location!

[Randy]

Getting uk rankings shouldn't have any detrimental effect whatsoever on worldwide rankings. In theory anyway. The idea should be elevate UK based sites for UK users, but give all an equal shot at worldwide rankings. Of course it never quite works out to be a clean as this, mainly because they don't give users a default of "search worldwide" even if there were such a preference for all users. Google still does Geo stuff with me and I ask them not to in several ways.

In all honestly what would make the most sense to lowly little me would be if the search engines would all simply start indexing and giving some credence to to almost-never-used meta name="geo.region" and/or meta name="city" tags. I know why they don't (these are hidden from users view, obviously) but so is the server's IP geo location for all intents and purposes! If they simply used those two tags as signals, and limited it to only believing the first entry in each, it would sure make a lot of this stuff easier. Well, cept it might be easy for unscrupulous SEOs to fool some international clients into believing they had worldwide rankings when in fact those folks were seeing geo targeted rankings.

<edit>

For completeness, Gigablast does index the above mentioned meta's last time I looked at it. No other engines did at that time however. And I don't know of any real searchers who use Gigablast.

[1dmf]

well it's not as easy as I hoped.

The hosting has CPanel installed, but I only seem to be able to add a 'parked' domain over the master account domain, not one of the add on domains, which is how I'm running the site.

So I've added the ccTLD domain as an add on doman and then used the redirect facility, only it doesn't give me an option to select type of redirection.

I'm not sure that's any good, as i don't think you wanted me to set up a redirect, and the CPanel doesn't allow me to chose redirect type so it's also going to be likely a 302.

Any suggestion where I go from here?

What's the difference between 'parked' vs 'redirected' ?

Also what do you mean by html site map which links to the parked pages?

There are no parked pages, just live pages wanting to be UK (IMG:style_emoticons/default/searchme.gif)

[Nueromancer]

If the domain is Not UK specific such as .co.uk or .org.uk for example then UK Located Hosting is required. However there is Google Geo Location Tool but that is not 100% and it also doesn't help the other search engines.

I would not hesitate and move it to UK Located hosting forthwith. The cost penalty of UK Hosting versus other places is not as hefty as it used to be and I find service to be very good. My host has 24/7 Live Chat and 0800 support to go along with excellent and cost effective packages.

They are around in the UK if you look for them and the pounds saved by going over the pond is frequently lost (and more) by loss of UK SE referrals and revenue.

you can get round the problem if you have links from enough authority sites based in the uk we helped a charity which had conditionname.org hosted by 1and1 in germany and after making sure we had a uk adress in the footer adding them to LBC. and redirecting links to deleted pages from major uk news papers eventualy we got them ranking for conditionname at p1 in pages from the UK

but as they where getiing links from the likes of the Guardian and the BBC not sure if you can rely on this for you site.

[1dmf]

well getting links from them would be nice, but I don't think that's likely.

Also why would IBLs from a specific ccTLD make your site become geo-targeted to the country giving you the links.

Are you saying if i got a bunch of IBL's from Japanese websites i'd show up in the 'Japan Only' searches for G!.co.jp

That's ridiculous if true, what's the point in showing me sites/companies that are not based in the country I specifically say I only want to see?

Doesn't make any sense to me.

[Rajesh]

Target in any geographical region your site should be follow five main things

1. Domain TLD
2. Hosting location
3. Regional based content
4. Set the webmaster tool
5. Make it popularity in that reason

Thanks

[1dmf]

1. Domain TLD

but what do you mean by this.

my TLD is .org and my hosting is USA, hence the problem.

I have a ccTLD of .co.uk but don't know what i'm meant to do with it to make the .org display in UK Only searches.