Good day, I have a domain that ranks 5th on the 1st page of google.ca but on 14th page of google.com. Keywords being "game server hosting" I have equal amount of customers visiting from US and Canada so how can this be and how can I correct this ? thanks
Sounds like 1) your domain has a country coded TLD of .ca, 2) you have your Geographical Targeting on Google's Webmaster Tools (WMT) Settings page set to target Canada OR 3) most of your backlinks are from other .ca domains. The .ca domains are automatically assumed to be targeting Google.ca. When last I looked you couldn't even change a .ca domain's Geographical Targeting in WMT. They ONLY targeted Google.ca. But this might have changed. It's been a while. The .com domains (and other non-country specific domains like .net, .org, etc.) are automatically assumed to be targeting Google.com. For domains with non-country specific TLDs you CAN change the Geo Targeting setting in WMT to another country. Which country your domain is hosted in also gives Google hints as o which Google index you're targeting and affects which view of the Google index you rank best in. But it should be noted you're NOT likely to rank well in BOTH Google.ca or Google.com. It's not impossible but it's VERY difficult. You'll need lots of "extra" backlinks and a backlink profile that includes links from other sites in both the Google.com AND Google.ca view of the index.
Dear DP member, Volume of competition varies from a server to an other that's why you can be number 1 in google.cn and number 1000 in google.com for the same keyword I'll give you a free tool to check your ranking and keep traking that in different data centers (40 countris) http://www.allno1.com/google_serp/multi_country_rank_checker.asp Hope you enjoy
The domain is a .net (xpservers.net) and in my google webmaster settings I set the preferred country to USA. The domain is also hosted in New Jersey
Interesting... Perhaps it's much less competitive in Google.ca, perhaps your URL's backlink profile has strong links from one or more Canadian sites, etc. Who knows? Without knowing the URL and the keyword phrase you're talking about, all we can do is guess.
url is www.xpservers.net keywords im using to search is game servers (ranked 20th page), game server providers (ranked 15th page) and game server rentals (ranked 1st page on google.ca, 15th page on google.com) Even thought my site is getting about 1200 unique hits a day my rankings are very low. There are tons of low traffic sites beating me.
First of all, you domain is expiring in 5 months+. Renew it and search engine will give more credit and you will gain some good SERP ranking too for it. Secondly, all your images don't have ALT declared. It is does not deliver any seo point there. Thirdly, noticed that you prefer your domain as www.xpserver.net and only have 30 backlinks pointing to it. But, http://xpserver.net getting 200+ backlinks. Set your preferred domain as http://www. or http:// at google.com/webmaster tool too. It will help too. It's good to have your site hosting in US and done geosetting on google webmaster tool. Now, all you need to do is get more backlinks from sites that ranked well in google.com or sites that is meant for .com Try not to get backlinks from .ca domains.
some excellent points, thank you I will alter these settings. Whats recommended text for alt ? Just a short description of the pictures ?
Does it matter if I change the picture file names to be relevant to KW also. Right now the picture file names have no relevance.