Page ranking in .com but not in .co.uk

[SDLOnlineChannel]

Hi there,

I tried to search the Q&A but couldn't find any answers to my issue.

We have a page that is ranking #2 for the term "translation memory" in google.com, but it doesn't show in Google.co.uk. This has been like this for weeks now. We are not targeting any specific country in GWT.

Does anyone know a possible explanation for this? Thank you.

[DaveSottimano]

Hey there,

Not sure I'm seeing the same SERPs as you...

Okay, for "terminology management" you rank 1st in the Uk https://www.google.co.uk/search?biw=1366&bih=683&q=terminology+management&gl=uk&pws=0

and #3 for "translation memory" https://www.google.co.uk/search?gl=uk&pws=0&q=translation+memory

Notice that I use 2 additional parameters in the search URL, pws=0 removes personalization and gl=uk tells Google I'm searching from the UK.

No offence to Maximillion here, but hreflang is not the right choice for you at the minute. If you start losing ground to UK based websites for these generic English terms, you can follow the previous advice but you'd have to make some really clever/complicated adjustments. From the current situation, you're in very good shape and you shouldn't need to do anything else.

[Milian]

I see. I kinda jumped the gun a little with that replay!

It's definitely an interesting case, the problem is usually the reverse of yours. Made even more intriguing by these other results.

[SDLOnlineChannel]

Hi Maximilian,

Thanks for your answer. Much appreciated.

However, we are a global company and we target languages, not territories.

We have other pages with the same conditions that do rank on both .com and .co.uk for their targeted keywords. E.g.

https://www.google.com/#q=terminology+management https://www.google.co.uk/#q=terminology+management So the issue is really just showing in that one particular page, which is the odd thing we are trying to figure out. Why that page?

[Milian]

The reason you most likely aren't ranking in the UK is you don't appear to have any company address on the site (in the UK or other wise), but the site is hosted on a US IP address.  So if the only clue to your location is your IP address, Google will use that. So if Google is thinking your site is in the US, there really isn't much reason for it to rank it in a UK based search.

The usual thing to suggest to get you ranking in the UK would be to Geo target your domain to the UK, but would you want to sacrifice your ranking in .com? As I'm pretty sure this would effect your .com ranking.

So to keep your ranking in .com and get ranking in UK searches, one approach would be to create an version of your site for the UK -  like you have currently have for your Chinese, German, French and Japanese pages.

You could created a sub folder such as:

http://www.translationzone.com/uk/    (such as Apple do )

Add a version of the site in there to target the UK and you can Geo Target just that folder to the UK in Google Web Master Tools.  Make sure to mark up the site using the correct rel="alternate" hreflang="x" language and locale attributes so Google knows its for the UK and how it relates to the rest of the site.

More reading can be done here on mult lingual sites guidelines.