Dangerous Thinking

As Google tries to make its search results more relevant, we’re seeing how content, TLD (eg .com, .co.uk etc) and host location are interacting to influence natural search results.

I’m not going to give any secrets away about our clients, but we’ve seen unexpected results for a number of sites and for this blog.

Let’s concentrate on Dangerous Thinking, because I’m happy to discuss what’s happening here. I live and work in the UK, but back when dinosaurs roamed the blogosphere, I registered dangerous-thinking.com, thinking that was more desirable than dangerous-thinking.co.uk.

This blog is hosted at A Small Orange in the States, as they came very highly recommended as a host for WordPress-based blogs. I have no arguments against ASO; how they can supply such excellent support for such a small hosting fee, I’ll never know.

But Google now looks at the .com and hosting arrangements and feels that the content here is relevant to a US-based audience, and will tend to list it on Google.com, rather than Google.co.uk.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I welcome US readers – in fact, anyone, from anywhere – here, but this blog has the ultimate purpose of attracting business to myself and Web Positioning Centre, and even our clients based abroad all have links to the UK. So I want this blog to rank well on Google.co.uk, as the UK is where our business comes from.

Now, as you may have seen on a previous post, I discovered that it is the top UK blog for ‘SEO Copywriting’, so things are obviously not as straightforward as I outlined above.

Let’s get the easy bit out of the way. The reason that this blog shows up on Google.co.uk searches is that it has a lot of content from the past that talks about where I live and the area we do business in – there are a huge number of references to Sussex, as well as some to London.

I dug a bit deeper by running a report on a whole bundle of key phrases to see how Dangerous Thinking performs on Google.com, Google.co.uk (Web) and Google.co.uk (UK). While it performs adequately on Google.com, its performance on Google.co.uk was a surprise. It performs very well on ‘Web’, but does not feature in the top 50 places on ‘UK’.

I conclude that the .com domain and US hosting is ruling it out of the most focused UK searches. I’ve run two tests now, some weeks apart, with the same result. So I’m planning to move Dangerous Thinking back to the UK. I hope that I don’t lose my US traffic, but the scientist in me wants to see what happens anyway.

I wonder who can recommend a reliable, reasonably-priced UK hosting outfit that runs cPanel? I want to transfer the blog in one easy hit.

Edit, 25 September 2007: My colleague, Paul Silver just made a very valid point. There are rather a lot of Dangerous Thinkings in bold in this piece. Now, for me, that’s just house style – I use bolds much as a traditional print publication would use italics, to highlight names and titles. The search engines might just think I was trying to spam them. So I’ve taken 50% or so of the DTs out.