Well…now it’s finally official: After a comprehensive study, NTT Europe online published that local Google Rankings depend tremendously on where you host.
I’ve noticed that with a few sites in France, Germany and Australia over the past 2-3 years. Without hosting these sites locally, it’s quite difficult to rank for anything.
UK SERPs however weren’t effected as dramatically as continental Europe. So rule of thumb:
1. Get a local TLD (.co.uk /.de/.fr…)
2. Host locally (double check if servers are really located in the country. Especially European hoster often run their servers in Germany or even in the US).
3. Build /buy inbound links from “local” sites
4. Register your domain in local directories as well as DMOZ.
5. Enjoy better rankings
Found via Seodeluxe
December 11th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
WMT’s geo-targeting tool could help very much with that as well. Here’s a very informative video from Google
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-start-multilingual-site.html
The video seems to claim that WMT could take care of #1 TLD and #2 Hosting IP. I really hope that that would true and that WMT would be robust and reliable in delivering the geo-targeting.
For certain smaller communities, while #3 and #4 are still important, and inorder to rank well, often times, the total no. of non-local BLs will overwhelm #3 and #4.
December 12th, 2008 at 12:34 am
Good info there! BTW, would you be able to clarify cos I thought Google frowns upon any inbound links that are “bought”. I was told Google have staff to periodically check if they see blogs or sites linked in substantially from some sites. Thank you if you can clarify on this.
December 12th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Not sure if G has people to manually check website, but I wouldn’t care too much since the web is too big for G to watch manually. The mix of link is important. You can buy them, bait them or do whatever you like. G is not the law..even if they sometimes pretend to be.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:43 am
Whichever way they check it, couldn’t it have an adverse effect on an individuals website?
April 19th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
quality stuff
May 7th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
This is a great post. Google is a mystery to most of us. Thanks for the post
June 6th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Interesting,i never had any problems with that! I host my websites in the US and get visits from google from all countries! I will look into it a little more!
Thanks for sharing this, keep up the good work!
Cheers
June 18th, 2009 at 5:37 am
I never realized that hosting the site locally would make a difference. However, I was aware that having a local TLD would help rankings…it only makes sense. If not all the .coms would be ahead of the game in UK listings.
June 27th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I actually did SEO for 2 similiar sites but one had a local TLD and of course their rankings were much higher than the .com in the UK search engines.
June 30th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
If you use Google webmastertools for your site, you can set the target area, so I guess in that case it doesn’t matter on what server your website is located…