Hi Everyone. I am bit confused regarding the country of a website. Do they see the Whois information for this ? Or They use the place where the site is hosted ? (This shouldnt be the case as many websites are hosted on US servers) Regards Gurpreet
For google purposes: a uk website is one which is hosted in uk, with a uk ip address(with a .com etc..), or ends in .co.uk Same for other countries presumably..
One of my .com sites was hosted on a US dedicated server for several years – whois info shows New Zealand. The site ranked #1-3 on google.com for over 3 years for my main key word. Last year I decided to change to a cheaper dedicated server here in New Zealand. Within weeks my site dropped to position #11-15 on google.com but got up to position #1-2 at google.co.nz I changed back to a US dedicated server after nearly 9 months ago but my ranking has not changed since than. Doesn’t make any sense to me at all.
Yep via ccTLD and server IP. The many sites hosted in the States either own ccTLD of the country they are targeting or simply dont show up in other country level 'pages from country' searches.
Google also uses the location of inbound links to geo target a site. If you have a .com but have masses of .uk domains pointing in , ESPECIALLY deep linking, then you can be seen as a Uk site. But the two main factors are physical location of IP and domain.
I'm setup the same a noniman. US server but NZ Whois A few months ago I tried putting some geo info in my header as follows: <meta name="ICBM" content="36.17, -115.14" /> <meta name="geo.position" content="36.17;-115.14" /> Points to Las Vegas. A week after that I noticed a time zone shift in my traffic and more targetted from the US. Could be just co-incidence. Only seemed to affect Google and not MSN or Yahoo. Has anyone else any experience of this ? Regards Brian
That’s of cause possible but would be quite a coincidence. I even got a PDF document ranking above me for several months now. That’s an interesting thought. Someone else tried this before?
its intresting to discuss this issue as it can effect many things later i am very happy to see response from members on the forum. Forget abt .co.uk, as this is clear from the domain, my main aim is to think regarding the generic domains , .com, .net and org i guess its mix of whois and IP, but cant say for sure.
I think the question should really be ‘Why isn’t Google trying to determine what geographical location is the site trying to target?†by site language, currency on a ecommerce site, incoming links and so on. If whois is a criteria how can a webmaster effectively target another country?
not necessarily....as a .co.in domain name is indian but can be hosted on a US server. So the domain name doesnt matter. I think the only way is IP address of the server.
but if it was only based on IP, they would make most websites in USA as more than 60 % of the servers are in USA and as hosting is cheap, resellers and web hosts have USA based hosting and IP
I don't know why I bother making posts sometimes if people don't read them Google uses Physical location of IP Domain registration suffix and location inbound link locations.
For those of you who don't believe OWG's sound advice.....http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/2006/07/tips-for-non-us-sites.html
Sorry for warming this old thread up again but I still don’t get it. As per my previous post, my site is a .com site, has an US based IP address and 99% of my incoming links are from the US and Europe. I am ranking #1 in google.co.nz when search worldwide for my main keyword but nowhere to be seen when clicking “Pages from New Zealand onlyâ€. When I search on google.com I am ranked #21 at the moment. The site itself is targeting visitors worldwide without any specific country in mind – it’s even translated into 4 different languages. The only thing really pointing to New Zealand is the Whois info which I believe I can change to whatever I want. The domain is parked at a New Zealand registrar – could this have something to do with it? Thanks