Apparently, the site in my sig. is #1 for 'London Escort Agency' in the US right now ... Until three days ago, it was also #1 here in the UK. It appears that MSN has started to favour sites that are either hosted in the UK and/or have a .co.uk. suffix. Can anyone confirm if this is the case?
I reported the other day that MSN.com is forcing .co.uk results on me. Something is going on, that's for sure. Pete
If they aren't they should be. They would be pretty far behind the times if they didn't. Hell, this little forum uses geo-targetting... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/usermap.php
Geo-targetting can be very bunk though, can't it? One of my sites for instance is hosted in the UK, but the spellings and site is targetted toward the US audience. It's rather a shame that the majority of my visitors are coming from the UK because I'm ranking higher in the UK on engines because of simple and crap geo-targetting. I feel the fact this particular site is hosted in the UK is also penalising me globally in the engines.. favouring sites in my niche from US sites for US visitors for example.. bleh! Geo-targetting should be far more complex then finding out where a site is hosted or located. There are other things to consider. If people are searching on GOOGLE.com or MSN.com they should get GLOBAL results with no favouring or geo-targetting. If the searcher ticks the 'Search locally' or 'Search in the <my state/country' then and ONLY then should they geo-target IMHO. This forcing nonsense bugs me. Pete
Something built internally by me. You can add something similar to your site if you want with this: http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/geovisitors/
Thanks for sharing. Do you subscribe to a service that updates the IP addresses and their geographical locations on a regular basis?
Yes, that's what I was wondering because I've seen some of those databases and at least the ones I saw, they weren't cheap.
How true. If only the world made sense. Forcing localized results has been the bane of many of my websites, until I figured out that it was and change my host. But that's why finding a host in your demographic area is also a very very good idea. ESPECIALLY if you run a small business in a local community.
It maybe common sense - but it's our epxerience that is makes a big difference if you use a cheap hosting solution (GoDaddy and the like) or if you get a dedicated server or at least a decicated IP. If you share an IP with a lot of our sites who knows what's going on ....