Google, links and geo-targeting
Like all the major search engines, Google favours local sites in their regional search results. A site that is served under a local domain or hosted on a locally registered IP will be favoured in the Google results for that locality.
e.g. A site served under www.domain.co.uk will receive a ranking boost in Google.co.uk. The same ranking boost is given to a non-uk domain if it is hosted on an IP address registered in the
UK.
This affect is greatly exagurated when a searcher chooses to look only at sites from their locality.
e.g. On Google.co.uk a search with the ‘pages from the UK’ selected will see only
UK domains or sites hosted under a UK IP.
Google has been geo-filtering this way for many years – And on the whole, they’ve been getting it right, until recently, when many sites have been exlculded from local indices, even when the sites match the Google’s criteria for local results.
For many businesses, especially those serving largely a local audience, this exclusion can ammount to upto a 30% reduction in traffic.
My analysis of sites affected show the exclusion is not sitewide (not all pages of the site) but just a few pages, which includes the home page in all cases. The home page usually has the most search engine traffic, hence will cause the most damage to a business. The home page is also the page which usually has the most external links pointing to it – which seems to suggest that non-local links may be at the heart of this issue.
Why would Google include geo-location of links
Using the domain and hosting location for geo-biasing works well on the whole, but for the US, where the most popular domain choice is a .com (not many sites addopting the .us extention) it can be difficult for Google to provide US relevant sites. The hosting location can provide some local relevance, but many non US focused sites will often host in the US for cost saving and will be included in the US results.
Factoring links can provide another metric which should help biase regional results more accurately for the US. But, this can cause a lot of problems for non-US .com sites, which get links from sites hosted in the US.
Many UK owned sites host in the US for cost saving, and the interlinking between these sites exadurate the problem even more, when they link to you.
When Google first started playing with this filter a couple of months ago, the affects were very severe, but they have been tweaking things down since, and many of the sites I montor have been returned to their rightful place in the UK only searches. Though, there’re some that are still excluded. The weight attached to links in geo filtering will always be a compromise as it’s not possible to serve both the US and the rest of the world equally, while the US sites do not adopt a the US domain, and hosting spreads to the cheapest countries (US for now)
What to do next
If your site is still suffering, I would strongly suggest you focus on getting high PR links from sites that are UK based (in the eyes of Google).
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment