Hi, I am wondering if the search engine optimization is the same for google.co.uk as for google.com. I want to market uk obviously and it is a new domain. Hope to hear from you all soon!
As per Google GEO policies, you can promote your co.uk domain only in UK as Google will automatically award its geo location as UK by checking its TLD(Top Level Domain). It will be quite difficult to promote your website worldwide...
if you optimize site for .com then it will rank well for .co.uk but not the other way round. if you are targeting UK then you will definitely rank well on .co.uk provided you have done good SEO
sorry that post is not only a massive generalisation, but its pretty much just plain wrong. I work full time as seo manager for a major UK ecommerce website, top 1000 alexa - so I kindof know what Im talking about here. If your domain is a .com and its geotargetted using google webmaster tools, its pretty much the same as having a .co.uk. If your domain is hosted outside of the uk its detrimental to the uk focus, therefore the top combination is: UK hosting UK TLD ie. .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk etc GeoTargetting to the UK. Also, your linking structure must be weighted towards getting links from on topic sites that are within the UK. "international" focus seo is of little relevance to rank well in the UK, so dont take any notice of the whole "if you rank well in the US you will rank well in the UK" comment, as its absolute rubbish. in 99% of online verticals you will see completely different SERPs in the UK or any other country compared to searches on google.com within the USA, as google proactively tries to serve you the most relevant page. to demonstrate this just search for major players like ebay, amazon etc. in any regional google, you will allways see the regional site #1 in the serps, whereas you WONT see the .com site, despite the fact that it may have tens of millions of links, and be a PR9 compared to a PR6 with a few hundred thousand links. So, if you are targetting the UK, just focus on being 100% uk related, in your domain, hosting and linking policy. thanks, MOG
Hmmm I do not agree. I have seen lots of UK sites (.co.uk) ranking well in google.com, even when on holiday out of the UK, for example when I am North Africa! I think it depends on how you handle to SEO. If you want to target the UK, try to get well known with a few decent UK bloggers, offer them guest posts etc...
Listen to MOG (he/she knows what they are talking about). The techniques MOG mentioned will be become increasingly more important as search engines get better at incorporating local search into their results pages.
I am not saying, it will not be ranked on .com... I am just trying to understand that .co.uk website will perform better on google.co.uk, however, it will need some more efforts to get ranked on .com as Google will automatically consider its geoloaction by checking its TLD...
For Google.co.uk you must use UK based directories, blog sites & it also give preference .co.uk domain.
Hi MOG, how many domains have you tested in regards to rankings being associated to the hosting being located in the zone where you intend to rank? Have you compared this to co.uk domains hosted in the US or Canada setup properly to target the UK in webmaster tools? So far, from what I've seen, it doesnt really have an impact and it's been more of an urban legend than anything. If you do have detailed data, I'd love to see it, simply because we purchased an extremely expensive .co.uk domain and we'll be hosting it in the US on our dedicated server. But the last two points really are money: UK TLD ie. .co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk etc GeoTargetting to the UK. And local links of course.
Ive experimented with 20-30 domains, playing about with geo-targetting, hosting IP and TLD, and iterations of all three. we also have regional domains for 5 european countries and moving the datacenters to the areas that the TLD was present for resulted in a 5% upswing in non paid keywords over 45 days, the data is based on a mature business with steady traffic and no other variables that were in our control being changed.
thanks for all the replies guys. so if i understand right and please correct me if i am wrong. the ideal situation is to have f.e. cheapredcars.co.uk hosted in the uk, targetting people from uk who wants to buy cheap red cars? and have links from .co.uk sites/ uk-targetted sites? thanks for all your time.
Find link partners or one way links from sites that has a .co.uk extension (must be relevant to your site)... Also, hosting your site in a .co.uk based hosting company can be of a help..
I've found the inbound links to be the most important factor for ranking UK sites well. Even when I host in the UK and have a .co.uk domain, if the links are from the US then I rank better in Google US than UK. I do have .com's that are hitting the top spot in Google UK tho' but only because they have valid UK inbound links.