1st on Yahoo.com (US) 87th on Yahoo.com(UK)

Ok, I'm doing an SEO campaign for a client. They want to come up on the first page for their phrases. The domain is a c-0-m domain.

I live in the UK and so does the client, and their prospective clients. How can there be such a vast difference? Especially since the website is hosted on a UK server.

Any help would be appreciated.

seolondon said:

Ok, I'm doing an SEO campaign for a client. They want to come up on the first page for their phrases. The domain is a c-0-m domain.

I live in the UK and so does the client, and their prospective clients. How can there be such a vast difference? Especially since the website is hosted on a UK server.

Any help would be appreciated.

Click to expand...

First of all, don't call yourself SEO London when you can't answer such questions yourself.

Second, Yahoo is weird, why not just use Google?

Third, it may be that you would need the .co.uk domain in order to rank higher, but I'm not certain of that.

My thinking on this subject is that if you only want to rank in the UK, use a .co.uk domain name. Also, ensure that you have the site in your webmaster tools,and that you have it set to target visitors from the UK.

I don't believe where the site is hosted makes any difference.

It probably had to do with the competition. The competition may only be targeting the UK search engines, and doing so a lot better than you, so that is why they out rank you.

They probably have more targeted backlinks which are all on .co.uk domains. They may also have some link on a .co.uk authority website.

Yes - The US and UK Data is different.

"Compare the Market" on US - I have page1 ... on UK over 400

ShadeDream said:

First of all, don't call yourself SEO London when you can't answer such questions yourself.

Second, Yahoo is weird, why not just use Google?

Third, it may be that you would need the .co.uk domain in order to rank higher, but I'm not certain of that.

Click to expand...

1. I've actually got quite a bit of knowledge on the subject, but I couldn't work this one out, so thought I'd ask if people know.

2. I don't like yahoo either, but I need to give them the results for the SEO report. I do use Google, they're ranking at the bottom of the second page on Google.

3. I opted for the .co-m domain as it's a better TLD for the major SE's, generally speaking.

Use a .co.uk if want to be sure to get a absolute top ranking in the uk... You should know that with your knowledge...

Although i outrank plenty of sites on their own national google so what do i know...

ok, so maybe I don't know that much. Either way, appreciate all your help here. The thing is, I always thought that .c-o-m would outweight .c-o.u-k, regardless of location. In order to get the .c-o-.u-k - would I have to completely abandon the .c-o-m and start all my seo efforts again on the .c-o.u-k?

Well... Its a combination of several things like everything is with SEO.

If the competition is weak for your keywords or phrases you can easely outrank your .co.uk competitors. If its strong you eally have to have a shitload of high quality backlinks and proper onsite seo.

Submission to uk directories will also help.

I thought i read somewhere in the past that the location of your host also has some value in this case.

seolondon said:

ok, so maybe I don't know that much. Either way, appreciate all your help here. The thing is, I always thought that .c-o-m would outweight .c-o.u-k, regardless of location. In order to get the .c-o-.u-k - would I have to completely abandon the .c-o-m and start all my seo efforts again on the .c-o.u-k?

Click to expand...

There are some good answers in the post above me, by M1ndfluX. I'd just like to say that whatever you decide to do, ideally you should still grab the .co.uk extension especially because the business is based in the UK, even if you just leave it there, or better, 301 redirect it to the .com domain. You could then build .co.uk backlinks to the .co.uk one, and the link juice from these would eventually pass onto the .com.

why is everyone so bloody helpful here. Seriously, really appreciate all the help guys.

Only US and UK? or worldvide?

pardon? didn't understand that question

seolondon said:

2. I don't like yahoo either, but I need to give them the results for the SEO report. I do use Google, they're ranking at the bottom of the second page on Google.

Click to expand...

Thats about as useful as being nowhere but at least your on the right track (assuming you got them that far)

3. I opted for the .co-m domain as it's a better TLD for the major SE's, generally speaking.

Click to expand...

Not at all. Old.coms which have obvious localization efforts and lots of authority can rank well over multiple countries data centres, but actually for the most part the search engines are all about localization now. For high competition keywords (especially product and service related searches) if you aren't an old authority site and you only want to target a specific country you are much better off going for the country specific tld.

.Coms can theoreticaly rank well across all english speaking countries in all major search engines, but depending on the business in question that may not be particularly useful and You also have to work doubly hard to target countries outside of the US, because the assumption will be your targeting the US (you can over ride in Google Webmaster tools but not fully and that doesn't help with Yahoo).

Frankly if the .co.uk is still available I'd personally grab it and then put a mirror of the site up, maybe 301 the .com to the co.uk. Depends on what the client does and whether they care about international business.

Talsin said:

Thats about as useful as being nowhere but at least your on the right track (assuming you got them that far)



Not at all. Old.coms which have obvious localization efforts and lots of authority can rank well over multiple countries data centres, but actually for the most part the search engines are all about localization now. For high competition keywords (especially product and service related searches) if you aren't an old authority site and you only want to target a specific country you are much better off going for the country specific tld.

.Co-ms can theoreticaly rank well across all english speaking countries in all major search engines, but depending on the business in question that may not be particularly useful and You also have to work doubly hard to target countries outside of the US, because the assumption will be your targeting the US (you can over ride in Google Webmaster tools but not fully and that doesn't help with Yahoo).

Frankly if the .co.uk is still available I'd personally grab it and then put a mirror of the site up, maybe 301 the .c-o-m to the c-o.u-k. Depends on what the client does and whether they care about international business.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your response. I'm particularly interested in the last part of it. You mention mirroring the site, but would that not be duplicate content? Getting penalised is the last thing I'm looking for.

Duplicate content is a funny thing, the rules don't quite work the way linkbuilders on this forum suggest they do.

Basically the reason why when building backlinks (like fake blog farms) people use non duplicate content is because they don't want Google to know its all being created by one person. In that case duplicate content going up on the same day across 50+ websites is a big red sign to Google that something funny is going on.

Now when it comes to having more than one site like you do, if you stick up the 301 redirect from your current site to the new (mirrored) one, the search engines will know aha this guy owns both sites and he wants the relevancy of site A to be applied to site B instead, then they will also include the factors that would make site B rank higher and therefore the new ranking for site B will (after a little while - not straight away) be site A's rank+sites B bonus.

Do you care about the .com still running ? Do your clients want any international business or is there just no way to handle it ? You could in theory keep both sites running fully, make small changes to site B which heavily indicates its a UK operation and makes the pages count as unique, then just link normally between the two sites to pass around small bits of juice.

I've probably confused you, but go and have a look at some major (international) online retailers websites to get an idea of what I mean about running multiple almost duplicate sites which are location targeted.