I am currently in the process of moving this website to a UK based web hosting company. The reason behind this is because in order to get listed in the www.google.co.uk search results, when the UK filter is applied, it is important to have one of either a .co.uk domain (irrespective of the hosting location) or a UK based server. SEOptimise.com doesn’t meet either of these requirements at the moment as it uses a .com domain suffix and is hosted by 1&1 in Germany, therefore it hasn’t been included in the Google UK SERPs.
www.google.co.uk provides 68% of all web searches in the UK, according to Hitwise last month, which obviously means that the site has been missing out on potential traffic from many UK searches where high global rankings have been achieved, being UK based this is a major issue.
The switch should be complete in the next couple of days and I’m looking forward to seeing how the UK rankings improve once the new server information has been collected by Google. For anyone currently experiencing a similar issue I have moved servers to Streamline who are a UK based web hosting company I have used in the past and would highly recommend.
I’d be interested in hearing if anyone has moved servers for the same reason and finding out how long it took to start appearing for Google UK filter queries?
It is such a shame that you have to change hosting server location simply to ensure that the website is listed on the Google.co.uk local search filter !!!!
This smacks of anti-competitive pressure by Google and is short sightedness by the Google Geeks who set policy within Google.
I like the idea of localised search within Google – but it should be up to the website owner to allocate the focus location which the owner wishes Google to filter either via a Meta Tag or within the site owner’s Google account.
As a developer/reseller for many clients, its a serious pain having to locate uk biased websites with UK hosting providers at inflated prices compared to great services in the USA for instance!!!!
Its about time Big G’s stopped being techy for tech sake and empower their users with a little more control of how their domains appear in their SERPS :-(
Martin