Google.co.uk & Google.com difference of ranking
-
How can our website rank on page 3 in google.co.uk and yet it ranks on page 20 for the same keyword on google.com?
This doesn't seem to affect our competitors though and its only our site that is being affected/penalized.
-
For technical signals they'd have to remove any UK signals by replacing with US or neutral. Like hosting location (US) or Webmaster Tools' geographic target setting (Unlisted).
For content signals, agree: keep what already exists with possibly some revisions and/or build additional content that refers to the global nature of the business and the markets being served. Maybe home page copy that talks about "serving clients world-wide". Pages like "Top 5 Reasons Californians Visit Blackpool", and all that kind of thing indicating the page is relevant to Californians.
-
Instead of removing UK ranking signals, would it not be better to add some US ranking signals in addition - in an effort to rank for both .co.uk and .com?
-
I see this happening in Canada. Even though in reality your business, like many in Canada, is serving a global market, Google suddenly decides your website is primarily relevant for one of the non-US English speaking markets, and so knocks it back on .com while leaving it alone on .ca (or .uk or ..au.).
My strategy would be to remove as many signals as possible that would make them think you're only serving the UK.
There can be a problem with this approach: hopefully not in your case but there may be a period where the non-.com ranking suffers as a result. I had a situation where I had a clear choice between ranking page 1 on .ca .uk .au while page 10 on .com - or on page 2 for all. Webmaster tools market setting could be flipped back and forth at will to cause either state. The only way out was to set it at page 2 for everywhere and do everything else to get back on 1 - took time and we had to accept the page 2 .ca etc ranking meanwhile.
-
We used to get good traffic from both google.co.uk and google.com as some mobile devices are set to use google.com by default and its still showing the correct listings for all other sites which rank in the uk search in google.com so its more curiosity as to why we were being penalized.
The other point is our not wanting to miss out on foreign visitors who are looking for hotels in Blackpool as it is a tourist hotspot so to speak.
We're clearing cache and checking in incognito browsers to check rankings and to add to the mystery some visitors (depending on isp's) see the sites on page 1.
Thanks for the offer of checking rankings, we have this covered.
-
Out of interest why do you want to rank on google.com if you are targeting "blackpool hotels" are you getting a lot of US clients?
I would of thought it would be mainly UK searchers you're looking to target?
Also have you tried using SEO Moz's ranking checker to confirm a US search position? (It could be google personalising your search).
If you PM me your domain and keyword ill check for you.
-
Pre-penguin we had 2 sites which dominated the Google search for "blackpool hotels" and hundreds of variations. The sites are beginning to perform again for the longer keywords and most are returning to page 1. The money term, so to speak, is "blackpool hotels" as it gets over 27,000 searches in google per month.
One of our main competitors had/has a much worse linking profile than us and they jumped back into page 1. They hold less content for their clients than we do too. With the content of our competitors and ourselves being related to the UK no overseas office are in play.
Geographically our servers are located in the US, simply down to budget at this time. The links we have were never paid for and we've never really launched any campaigns down to our content being so good.
Neither site has any duplication of its content on other domain names (this was removed in May) and all duplicate content was redirected to the main or given canonical meta info.
Rankings were always top 5 in both google.com and google.co.uk pre-penguin.
All the rankings in Bing and Yahoo have been unaffected with the post-penguin changes we've made which does point out the links we had were poor to begin with.
Does this all sound like its to do with old links from duplicate sites still playing a part?
-
There's lots of factors at play here - for example, what are you competitors backlink profiles like? Are they getting links from the US / World wide? How does this compare to your backlink profile.
What about citations, (reputable) directory listings? How about on-page references to over-seas offices etc. Do you have projects/services targeted at these markets? Where are their sites hosted?
How are they ranking for other keywords, particularly geographically relevant terms? Can you identify what your competitors are doing that you aren't?
You mention that you had to remove content to get back the .co.uk rankings. I take it your trying to recover from penguin?
Have the ranking on google.com always been this way though (even before you were penalised?)
It's hard to be more specific without details of the site/keyword(s) in question.
-
Its a good point you make, but all the sites ranking in the top 4 pages remain the same in google.com search for the same keyphrase that rank in google.co.uk - all apart from our site(s) which seem to be penalized.
Would this be down to a difference in algorithms on differing google servers? Could some be seeing content we've removed to get back the .co.uk rankings?
-
Generally speaking it's a lot harder to rank on google.com than it is for a geo location like google.co.uk - perhaps you are sending stronger signals to google that you are a uk based company?
FYI if you are only trying to rank in the UK then anyone going to google.com gets redirected to .co.uk any way.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Google Analytics Numbers Are Weird
Hi, I'm having a strange problem from past one month. My website gets about 10k pageviews a month with an average bounce rate of 50%. Lately, I observed a strange thing. The avg time on page of visitors from selected countries is less than 1 second and the bounce rate is zero!! How is this possible? This is happening from past one month and it would be really helpful if you guys could tell me what exactly is happening?? Ive attached a screenshot for better understanding. website url : https://www.specbee.com/ fIAXXgF 3zQuBAN
Reporting & Analytics | | ganesh10 -
Is having the same URL in several sitemaps a problem for google?
We have 30 sitemaps, one for each language version of our site. About 5000 pages per sitemap.
Reporting & Analytics | | lcourse
To get a better idea on which pages google is not indexing, I thought about quickly generating sitemaps by page cagetories to see if there are any patterns. Any problems if I submit now new additional sitemaps dividing all our pages by product page, considering that the same pages are already in our existing sitemaps we submitted in the search console. So having same URL in more than 1 sitemap would be a problem? As a side note, we observed when adding a sitemap index that google search console in its count of total indexed pages, now counts every page twice since we submitted both the sitemap index and the individual sitemaps, so search console does not recognize in count that sitemaps in sitemaps index are identical to the ones we submitted individually in search console.0 -
Cross domain tracking Google Analytics
Hi there, Got a question on cross domain tracking: We have a couple of TLD's to serve localized content to our visitors, next to our main .com TLD where our app is running as well in a subdomain. Situation is this: Local sites:
Reporting & Analytics | | jorisbrabants
marketingsite.be
marketingsite.com.br
marketingsite.fr Main site: marketingsite.com
app.marketingsite.com Conversion gets triggered when somebody ends up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse for example. People can sign up at the local site filling in their email but they end up in app.marketingsite.com/firstuse Reading this article on cross domain tracking I'm getting a bit confused on the setup of the tracking code itself. The sample code provided shows these two lines: ga('require', 'linker'); ga('linker:autoLink', ['maindomain.com','targetdomain.com']); Now the question 🙂 Is it correct when I think that maindomain should be replaced with our local TLD's on every one of those, and that targetdomain is where the conversion happens? In this case the .com site?0 -
Google Analytics unexplainable traffic spike
Viewing this report **Behaviour > Site content > All pages **with primary dimensions of **Page ** and **Page title **are showing different results for one specific page on our site. We noticed a huge spike in pageviews and entrances to that specific page on our site. The user flow report shows traffic going through and from the page (in high volume) from other pages on the site which suggests that it's not the usual case of spam referrals. When I view the report above by page, I get unrealistic data. Over 600% increase in pageviews and over 900% increase in entrances. When I view by page title however, I get realistic results. Can anyone help shed some light on why these two reports will be different? Anyone else seeing similar issues?
Reporting & Analytics | | OptiBacUK0 -
Google Webmaster Tools During GA Transition?
I'm working with a client that is launching a new website. Google Webmaster Tools can just be disconnected, then reconnected to the new Google Analytics property, correct? Without any data loss in Webmaster Tools? Thanks! Becky
Reporting & Analytics | | Becky_Converge0 -
All goal conversion in Google analytics showing under referral
Hi All, I have switched my website from http to https After switching from http to https all goal conversions in Google analytics showing under referral.I have also updated the GA code for https. Please help me out to fix the issue. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Alick3000 -
Google analytcics sub domain dot or not?
Buongiorno from 16 degrees C wetherby UK famous for the Wetherby Whaler Chippy 😉 OK... on this site http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ I've set up sub domain tracking as so:
Reporting & Analytics | | Nightwing
Parent site:
http://www.philpotts.co.uk/ Sub domain
http://shop.philpotts.co.uk/ So my question is please: should a dot be placed in the sub domain line as in : _gaq.push(['_setDomainName', '.philpotts.co.uk']); Some advice places a dot in setDomainName other advice doesnt 😞
Any insights welcome, Grazie,David0