BANS Today

US Hosting UK Sites (update)

Written by mbpage on July 11, 2008

In my post US Hosting UK Sites I discussed my realisation that my .com and .net domains targeting the UK were not being indexed in the UK and the plans I had to turn things around. I am pleased to say that these have been successful. The solution was similar to that outlined in my post on .info domains.

If you read that post you will know I use HostGator because of the exceptional value for money they provide compared to the cost of UK hosting. The disadvantage of this is that any domain with the exception of a .co.uk will not easily (if ever) find it’s way into the google.co.uk index. With Googles webmaster tools also failing to sort this out their are only two solutions.

Host country specific sites in the country you are targeting (not as easy as it sounds because in the UK the leading hosting company’s servers are located in Germany) and often expensive e.g. £9.95 per month per domain.

A much better and much cheaper solution is to use HostGator and just buy country specific domains. I bought .co.uk for my UK stores via Godaddy. Moved my existing stores and redirected the old domains as outlined in my previous post and low and behold they appeared between 2-5 days later in the google.co.uk index where they need to be.

Tags: country specific domains, domains, SEO

US Hosting UK Sites

Written by mbpage on July 1, 2008

This is a big lesson learned.  When I first decided to use Hostgator to manage my websites I made a number of inquiries about the likely effect on UK targeted BANS stores being hosted in the US.  Everyone assured me all would be fine (I asked questions in a number of forums).  As things have turned out it is not fine.

If you host BANS stores in the US targeting another country then you must use a local domain rather than a .com or a .net.  Why?  Because you will not get in the local google index.  Say I have golfclubs.com a UK store hosted in the US.  Google will not index it in Google.co.uk only Google.com which means more than 95% of UK searchers will never find your site.

To get around this you must either host your .com in the UK (expensive) or buy a .co.uk domain hosted in the US.  Google will then identify it as a UK site and include it in the UK index (so I have read and am about to test).  Now there is an option in Google Webmaster tools to state which country your site is targeting but in my experience this does not work.  All my UK sites are currently indexed in Google.com and not one in Google.co.uk despite setting this flag more than 8 weeks ago in some cases.

So if you want to be found in a specific variant of Googles index either host in that country or buy the correct domain name for that country.  I hope that’s clear.

Finally, the gap between this and my last post is as a result of a  well earned break.  I don’t like to announce these things before I take a vacation and I had hoped to post whilst I was away but I couldn’t get a wireless connection so in the end I decided to just let it be.

Tags: country specific domains, country specific hosting, hosting, SEO, us hosted uk websites