Hi all,
The following is something that has been brought to my attention by an SEO company and from what I can gather there appears to be some weight in what they say yet I can’t find any online resources that might help me in actually doing this.
We have a website physically hosted in Ireland and the domain name for that website resolves to an IP registered in Ireland. That’s where we do the majority of our business so that’s where we have setup camp. However this particular website needs to score well with the UK search engines which it is not currently doing.
The SEO company has recommended that we should register the domain name with a UK IP address but to point this to the website so that it registers with UK search engines. This obviously isn’t just a simple case of changing the DNS settings for the domain since that would make use of the IP address of the physical site in Ireland and result in the site still appearing as a site in Ireland.
So my question is this: How do I go about altering the domain name to use a UK IP address that resolves to a website physically located in Ireland yet from a search engine point of view appears to be in the UK?
I hope that makes sense. I’m a long time lurker round these parts and rarely need to post a question but this has me running round in circles.
Thanks in advance.
G
There’s a couple of points here:
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The SEO benefits/impediments to IP-based hosting and geo-location/targeting based on location and server location. Normally the search engines have this pretty well tidied up but I know there are issues in the UK with geo-targeting and hosting.
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If you’re looking to get around this, you might want to consider using a Reverse Proxy - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy - I have had this used for a major international site in the EU.
While #2 worked, we ended up ditching the proxy server for a better SEO targeting and implementation. After testing we found that the hosting location of the site and the IP location/assignment isn’t that much of a strong signal, compared to ccTLD and geo relevance to your target audience - other signals like a UK address, selecting UK as the target in the Webmaster Tools Console etc.
Hi Seriocomic,
Thanks for the feedback. We make use of a .com (the SSL cert is registered to the .com) domain name for the website with a .co.uk being redirected to the .com. I’m not sure if this will have an effect or not in terms of ccTLD.
To be honest with you I have never spent much time with the Google webmaster tools but I’ve been pointed there on a few occasions and feel that I may need to do so again in this.
I’m also not 100% confident that I understand what you mean by ‘better SEO targeting and implementation’. Perhaps you could clarify upon that a little if you wouldn’t mind.
There are a number of options:
- segmenting your site for your UK audience - either via a sub-domain/sub-folder, or even completely on the .co.uk domain. (if you are using the .com and the site is targeting UK/Ireland then you really need to tell Google and the other search engines that is where you’re targeting using their Webmaster Tools)
- ensuring that you target UK terms - locations etc, in the pages that relate to your UK customers - if the site needs to target both UK/Ireland equally then it’s important to have text on your pages that states that - e.g. “Delivering to our customers in Ireland and across the UK” etc
Here’s some more reading:
* http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2008/06/which-domain-internationalisation-strategy-to-use.html
* http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/making-geotargeted-content-findable-for-the-right-searchers/
* http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Algorithm-Matters/Geo-targeting-Kingons-film-at-11.html
* http://www.huomah.com/Search-Engines/Search-Engine-Optimization/International-SEO-Made-EasyInternational-SEO-Made-Easy.html
* http://www.seomoz.org/blog/geolocation-international-seo-faq
* http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/301-redirect-geolocation.asp
* http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html