I have a client who operates several affiliates around the world. Recently their affiliate in australia has come to me complaining that the website is not in the country specific australia search and wants to know how to get it in there. I know the two main ways to get into country specific search is through domain name or hosting account. The website is a .com website and its hosted here in America, so these aren't issues. Would one solution be to create an australian domain name and have it redirect to the main page? Would google index that? Are there any other solutions to the problem? Thanks Brandon
i think you must get links from australian sites. this will increase your ranking on australian search
from my experience, host with a hosting company that have their server locally installed in the specific country will definitely bring traffic from google country specific search engine, for example, i do blogging with free hosted blogsome.com and this server hosted in Ireland, i always very much receiving hits from Ireland Google Search, Google.Ie and another case is i registered a hosting with a Singaporean guy, which is very likely his hosting server installed locally and always receving hits from Google.SG thats the way u do it, try host with a server that a locally hosted in that specific country.
The major search engines use two common criteria for determining geo-location: (1) the presence of a Country Code Top Level Domain name (CC TLD, as in 'somesite.co.au'), or (2) the physical location of the server that hosts the site based on its IP address. Google says that they will 'sometimes' refer to the Domain Registration data, but they don't specify when, so its not reliable. But no other <meta> tag, inbound link, or incantation will affect geo-location. And since all of the major search engines give a lot of weight to geo-location, even when the user does not request a country-specific search, it is very important to have this situation under control. In your case, you need to either switch to a .au domain name, or move to a host whose servers are physically located in Australia. There is no other solution. Good luck!
Exactly what rainborick said. 1st option is to get a .com.au 2nd option is to host it physically within Australia or get an IP that has an address in Australia. A redirect of the .com.au will not help you get ranked in Australia. You still need to have a site that has unique content diffrent from the US site. Depending on the industry most Australians search for things online by selecting (pages from australia) when searching in google. A site that is not hosted in australia or a .com.au will not appear in these results.
If we were to set up a .au domain and a main page for this franchise that was different from the main site, then had all the links go from there to the US part of the site and which is hosted on the same server. Would this work? Would this be a problem? Just looking for the easiest most cost effective solution. This is a relatively big company, but they do not want to create a separate site for each region of the world.
- make the sites that parts language <html style="direction: ltr;" lang="en-au"> - get australian links pointing to those pages But if they want to be seen when "pages from the Australia" seached you have to work hard cause these are the 2/4 of the factors google determines a sites location.
Possibly may work, it depends on the industry you are in. If it is a competitive industry then a one page website is not going to have much weight making it harder to compete against the genuine australian sites.
If your site is Perth or Sydney related, see my sig for free link submission. If you want .au based hosting (Sydney datacentre), we can help there: www.chillitech.com.au
Reporting to Google is a better option. Get sites banned who are not good and use copied content, as it will help in better user experience
In my opinion the only way to rank well in the Australian SERPs is to use a .com.au domain. I manage a few .com.au websites and they all rank well for their required keywords in the AU SERPs, admittedly they are not highly competitive terms but the .com.au is a huge factor, these sites are all hosted in the U.S., and for one of the sites, the majority of back links are are on U.S. websites without any ill-effects.