Google’s search engine ignores Google Local
A few weeks ago I asked Is localisation affecting your search engine performance? Obviously, moving a site with a .com domain to a UK-based server will solve the problem of getting the google.co.uk UK rankings.
But my colleague Paul Silver wondered if we we could find another way of establishing this blog’s UK provenance. We ended up registering Dangerous Thinking on Google Local, so Google knew that the blog had a real physical UK location.
We sat back and waited to see if Google Search picked up on the Google Local registration. Some six weeks later, it hadn’t, so we’ve concluded Google Search does not reference Google Local.
Whether Google will join up the two services in the future, I don’t know – it seems very logical to. But they don’t appear to work together now.
Edit (20 November 2007): Burrowing back into my RSS feeds (I always read the most up-to-date ones first), I found Google’s answer to search localisation in a post on the Webmaster Central Blog back in August called Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts.
Here we go:
Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.
In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, “.co.uk ” domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server’s IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.
So, there we are. IP and top-level domain.
you can use webmaster tools to tell them where you’re from now aswell!
Thanks Kelvin
Will that do the trick? Have you tried it?
David
Not sure whether it over-rides over signals but I think thats their aim
Hi Kelvin
I’ve looked at Google Webmaster Tools and, while it does have a geographical targeting feature, it’s not what I want. It says:
“Some sites target users for a particular geographic location. For example, a site may target all users within a specific country, or it may target only those users who reside within a very small geographic area within that country.
If your site is targeting users within a particular geographic area, please provide us with the relevant information below, using only the fields that apply to your target audience.”
In other words, if I use this feature, then the way I read it, I will be excluding traffic from anywhere else in the world.
But thanks for the heads-up. It could be useful in another context.
David
Yep, the geo-targeting in the Webmaster Console helps, as does the network you’re seen in. Ensuring that you aim to gather the majority of your controlled backlinks from UK-based sites (.co.uk/UK IPs) will push things in the right direction as well.
Thanks Adam