Does your websites location effect your search engine listings?

Yes it does, and it is very pertinent question given the rapid expansion of localised services on the major search engines, Google in particular.

However the physical location of a website does not impact so much how a website performs in 'local search' becuase local search is taken from directories such as Yell. It definitely does however effect how a website performs in standard google.co.uk searches.

The critical factor here is what the actual top level domain name extension is.  The domain extension plus the IP address is what you need to watch for. These combos are the ones you need to be aware of if your main customer base is in the UK.

UK IP + .co.uk = Good

UK IP + .com = OK

US IP + .com = Bad

nb: UK IP does not mean UK Independence Party before someone points it out.

Infact in 2003 Neutralize (*\*) undertook an exercise for justtheflight.co.uk to migrate them from the .com extension of their name to the .co.uk in order to try and prevent US based users accessing the website, and improve its relevency.

The problem for the search engines is they want to deliver the best experience to users, and therefore the most relevent results, so they base the decision about what pages to return in the SERP (search engine results page) on the information they have available:

• content
• backlinks
• domain name
• site IP address

However lots of businesses host elsewhere in the world for financial reasons; infact the US and Germany are probably the most popular physical locations for servers.

So if a user chooses to see 'UK Only' results and you are on a US IP with a .com domain, then you are probably not going to show up.

The solution I propose is that in order to give control back to the website owners, the major search engines start recognising a Meta Tag, which site owners can use to specify the primary country audience for their content.

ie:

<meta content="country" value="UK">

Notes about a country identifying Meta Tag.

• The values might be based on those used by the search  engines already.
• It may accept multiple forms.  For example UK or GB or England or Britain which the search engines would then map to their own systems regional capabilities.
• You would need to be able to include multiple occurences of a tag where the content is relevent to multiple countries IE: multilingual websites on one domain.
• It is evidently open to abuse, so a sort of spam reporting mechanism is a good idea.

At the end of the day search engines want to get the right information infront of the right user, so do we and anything that helps do this is good.

To learn more about the issues of localisation you might want to attend the event New directions In Search (NMK) 23/06/2005