I have .com and country domains - use servers in USA. However most my sites are focused for some small countries in Europe. I note that on Yahoo.com I beat my competition on almost any search query with my .com domain - however using local versions of yahoo the .com domain is found on anything between page 2-20. A position 1 on yahoo.com can be a position 200 (in the worst case on the local "country version of yahoo for a very competitive term). All content in local language in this case (not English) Any solution for ranking in the local "country" yahoo search engine with a .com? Links? I see also the opposite situation - a country domain ranks high on local version .co.uk (no1.) but clearly lower on yahoo.com (english content site). So a country domain seem to be a better choice. Have a client with a .net domain used not to rank at all. The we got it to no 2 on Yahoo.com of 46.000.000 SERPS- all content in English, hosted in US. But the company is located somewhere in Europe. No content in the local language. Ranks now no 1 on the local version of Yahoo, while dropped to pos 106 on Yahoo.com. The problem is - we really only care about the Yahoo.com results for this international business. Note that in this case the .net domain is on a US server, content in English-language, the only suggesting a European company is the local address and company registration number. No content in local language - still the site ranks on the country version of Yahoo (No 1) Based on what does yahoo finally decide on country - and search engine version? Any suggestions ? Any known solutions? Thanks, Alex
I think geo-location plays some role. You could be launching alternative sites of yours (probably not with the same content, but preferable with unique content) on country specific domain names, for example .de and others. This will raise your expenses of course. Many folks prefer to host the site in the same country IP space as well. Not 100% sure on this - everything counts I guess.
Localised hosting can make a big difference in Google, though I'm not so sure about Yahoo. Set up alternative localised sites (in local language too if possible) and do some geo targeting on both sites, send US visitors to .net send EU visitors to the local site, hosted in the target country. try to make sure users can switch if they want. Don't get tempted to cloak too much with the geo-location stuff!