Targetting UK search Engines

[Fintan]

Hi Guys

I have a new site Data Clean|Controlled Environment Cleaning|Data Centre|Server Room and am looking to target both the UK and Irish markets. My main focus is the UK market.

Im sorting out links from global professional organisations / related companies etc

I know I should move to a UK server and will be organising that over the next couple of months

Does anyone have a list of UK web directories that they would recommend?

Anything else anyone can recommend that could help me to target UK search engines?

Thanks

Fintan

 

[mneylon]

Obvious ones:

- get a co.uk domain
- host the co.uk site on UK ip space (some Irish hosts can do this for you *cough* )

 

[glengara]

I'd have thought a .co.uk hosted on an Irish IP could work well, a lot of UK directories only list UK TLDs, IIRC...

 

[mneylon]

I'd have thought a .co.uk hosted on an Irish IP could work well, a lot of UK directories only list UK TLDs, IIRC...

Maybe so, but what about Google?

 

[Fintan]

I own the .co.uk and the .ie of the domain name, however I was hoping I could target both areas using the .com

I know google penalises duplicate content, so I didn't want to re-write the site for each market, or am I thinking about it too much?

 

[glengara]

In theory the TLD would have it appear in "Pages from the UK", while the IP would have it appear in "pages from Ireland".

 

[mneylon]

Yes, but I've seen weirdness on Google where it seems to default to showing a preference to the regional results even when you don't have the option checked ....

 

[glengara]

Actually a little digging around and that theory appears faulty, I couldn't find one instance of a .co.uk showing up in "Pages from Ireland". Also tried "Zoekmachine optimalisatie" (SEO in dutch) in "pages from Belgium" and not a single .nl turned up, same with "pages from Holland', not one .be. So the G inclusion by IP appears to only apply to the general TLDs...

 

[glengara]

I think we'll be seeing a lot more "regional" results for generic terms that previously would never have featured...

 

[RedCardinal]

In theory the TLD would have it appear in "Pages from the UK", while the IP would have it appear in "pages from Ireland".

I sat in on a crawler session at SES this morning and this came up. No difinitive response, but I can not ever recall seeing a .co.uk site in the Irish filtered results (or vice-versa).

Anyone else ever seen this?

I own the .co.uk and the .ie of the domain name, however I was hoping I could target both areas using the .com

I know google penalises duplicate content, so I didn't want to re-write the site for each market, or am I thinking about it too much?

Someone from Google is actually emailing me a response as to whether redirecting the ccTLDs to the main site will suffice to have the main site appear in each of those ccTLD filtered search results.

When I hear back I'll shoot you a mail.

[Edit]Sorry Glengara I just saw your follow up comment.

 

[Fintan]

Someone from Google is actually emailing me a response as to whether redirecting the ccTLDs to the main site will suffice to have the main site appear in each of those ccTLD filtered search results.

When I hear back I'll shoot you a mail.

That would be excellent if you can find that out.

Couple more questions then, what re-direct should I use and when building links should I use the ccTLD or the .com?

Thanks
Fintan

 

[zabbo]

Anyone got anything relating to the original questions, It's something I have an interest as well, help appreciated

 

[RedCardinal]

That would be excellent if you can find that out.

Couple more questions then, what re-direct should I use and when building links should I use the ccTLD or the .com?

Thanks
Fintan

I would link at the live domain rather than the redirecting domain if possible.

Set up redirect on the secondary domain to pass all link juice and trust. Do this at the page level if possible rather that simply moving everything to the new homepage.

Rgds
Richard

ps are you doing this in-house now?

 

[Seodude]

Hi Guys

I have a new site Data Clean|Controlled Environment Cleaning|Data Centre|Server Room and am looking to target both the UK and Irish markets. My main focus is the UK market.

Im sorting out links from global professional organisations / related companies etc


Fintan

Try using the distribution tag in your meta tags and setting it to each region Ireland,uk etc it has worked for me until I was asked to release the site worldwide and it works better for .com sites too

 

[hosting365]

ccTLD's and geo-IP seem to be the main factors. You can host in Ireland using 'UK' IP's or use the co.uk for the uk content.