Hi, First post here. Just getting to grips with the format! Lots of good info to be absorbed I have an odd situation with a site of mine. In Google.com it ranks #4 (and #1 on Bing.com and Yahoo.com), so it's doing pretty well. The problem is that the market I am targeting is specific to the United Kingdom and the site is stuck at position 15 for Google.co.uk and isn't even in the top 100 for the other two engines! I have a sneaking suspiciion that this might be because I am hosting the site on Hostgator.com in the US. Can anyone help with this odd little situation. Is it as simple as changing host to the UK? Any help will be gratefully rec'd! Thanks
It can be both simple and not simple Simple - You just switch the hosting company from US to UK and your website will have a higher ranking toward Google.co.uk Not simple - The changed on hosting geolocation will caused your ranking in US dropped, yet a guarantee of better ranking in Google.co.uk. It may have a better ranking but may not high as you expected. There are other factors involved to archive higher ranking in Google.co.uk, including your competitors and the market as well. I would recommend you build up backlinks from related websites that hosted under UK hosting company. It could help for your ranking in both US and UK without to made a huge change.
Hi Sxperm, thanks for the swift response. The keyword I am targeting is a piece of law in the UK, so nobody in the US (or anyone else, really) would be searching for it. I am assuming that most people in the UK use google.co.uk by default when they start a search, so that's the ranking I am after. I have a question regarding changing of host. If I switch from Hostgater to a UK host, I guess that I will need to transfer the blog and its contents somehow. I am assuming that this will have no effect on the backlinks I have already built? Your thoughts? Thanks for the help Ian
Just make sure that the URLs remain unchanged and make every effort to minimize downtime as you switch hosting, and your backlinks will be fine. I agree with Sxperm that switching to UK hosting is likely to improve your google.co.uk results. However, this is true unless you have a .co.uk domain; otherwise it will make no difference and don't bother. At the end of the day, having high quality relevant UK-based backlinks is what will make your rankings. Not blog comments / forum posts / article submissions etc. Do you have access to such links, and if not, what are you going to do to get them? That's the question you should be asking yourself. (Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.)