Those of us in the US are not seeing the same results in the SERPs as UK web surfers. Sites can be ranked higher or lower in the US SERPs compared to the UK SERPs. So what is one to do? This is the question at the High Rankings Forum. The webmaster who poses the question says that he is ranking on page 2 in the US and AU but on page 9 in the UK.
Moderator Randy suggests that the reason for this problem could be because of a slight difference in the algorithms:
As you've noticed, the regional/country search runs off of its own database, and sometimes has its own algorithm that may be close to but is not exactly the same as the .com version uses.
What are the possible solutions to this problem? A similar issue was brought up several months ago at the Search Engine Roundtable Forums. Some of the tips include:
- Getting links from .co.uk hosts and other UK-based sites
- Hosting your site in the UK
- Making sure all your hosting services remain in the UK (that is, your nameservers are also UK-based)
But there are other considerations, as David says:
sometimes a .com site will have to work twice as hard and have nearly twice as many quality backlinks to beat a .co.uk in UK Google even if it is UK hosted.
Past articles on this topic include Switching to UK Hosting to Get Rankings Within UK Google Listings and Move Server to Improve Rankings?
Forum discussion continues at High Rankings Forum and Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
