.com indexing

[adamc26]

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Hello,

Wonder if anyone can clarify something, Ive heard various rumours and now Im not sure what the answer is

I have a .com and .co.uk site that is hosted in the USA with an american IP add, someone told me that this will affect my google ranking and that I wont get ranked as a UK store.. Although the site is relatively new google seems to be indexing in the uk as when I do a (site:www ) check on google it finds numerous URLS when checking in the UK..

Can anyone confirm that I will get ranked eventually by google if I continue to host my site in the USA?

[ep90]

From what I've read it will rank with your setup - however you may get a small gain by hosting the .co.uk on a UK server. Make sure you have set your meta tags for the right country(s) as this also has an effect.

[Brendon]

There's a couple of intertwined issues here, indexing and country specific indices. Just getting indexed is the first requirement, and geolocation issues are irrelevant to that. Then there's the .co.uk index, which is a subset of the "main" .com index, focussing on "UK-specific" sites. The determination of whether a site is UK specific depends on lots of things, and having a US IP won't definitely exclude you, but it makes it harder to get in. The geolocation of your backlinks is far more important though

[tbp]

Theres a mention of this in Matt Cutts blog today:

How do I associate my site with a particular country/region using Google Webmaster Tools? Can I do this for a dynamic website?

The instructions in our Help Center explain that you can associate a country or region to an entire domain, individual subdomains or subdirectories. A quick tip: if, for instance, you are targeting the UK market, better ways of structuring your site would be example.co.uk, uk.example.com, or example.com/uk/. Google can geolocate all of those patterns.

If your domain name has no regional significance, such as Example Web Page, you can still associate your website with a country or region. To do that you will need to verify the domain, or the subdomains and/or subdirectories one by one in your Webmaster Tools account and then associate each of them with a country/region. However, for the moment we don't support setting a geographical target for patterns that can't be verified such as, for example, Example Web Page.

[jezaff]

^^ yeah, was just thinking that google allow you to register the right country. I think some people forget that actually google does work with webmasters to get the best possible listing results! It is in their interest too !

[adamc26]

Thanks guys all good tips certainly food for thought..

Ive done my alt image tags, titles and descriptions for all pages. I have got a site map underway but I have got a robot.text file up and running.

I know that my URL (guids) arent the most SE friendly but thats a big job to rewrite all of those obviously as my database relies on the numbers to pull the relevant products..

Other than content, which im aware I havent got much in the way of good unique creative writing, anything else Im missing... site - stylishted.com! keep it coming..

Ta

[ep90]

You need to make sure you do this on your US site:

<meta name="content-language" content="en-US">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-US">