Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Poor Google.co.uk ranking for a UK based .net, but great Google.com
-
I run an extremely popular news & community website at http://www.onedirection.net, but we're having a few ranking issues in Google.co.uk.
The site gets most of its traffic from the USA which isnt a bad thing - but for our key term "one direction", we currently don't rank at all on Google.co.uk.
The site is located on a server based in Manchester, UK, and we used to rank very well earlier this year - fluttering about in position 5-7 most of the time.
However earlier this year, around July, we started to fall down to page 2 or 3, and at the start of this month we don't rank at all for "one direction" on Google.co.uk. On Google.com however we're very strong, always on page one.
We're definitely indexed on .co.uk, just not for main search term - which I find a bit frustrating.
All the content on our site is unique, and we write 2-4 stories every day. We have an active forum too, so a lot of our content is user-generated. We've never had any "unnatural link building" messages in Webmaster Tools, and our link profile looks fine to me.
Do we just need more .co.uk links, or are we being penalised for something? (I can't imagine what though). It certainly seems that way though.
Another site, "www.onedirection.co.uk" which is never updated and has a blatant ad for something completely unrelated on its homepage, ranks above us at the moment- which I find quite frankly appalling as our site is pretty much regarded as the worlds most popular One Direction news and fan site.
We've spent the last few months improving the page-load times of our site, and we've reduced any unneccesary internal linking on the site. Approx 2 months ago we launched a new forum on the site, 301'ing all the old forum links to the new one, so that could have had an impact on rankings - but we'd expect to see an impact on Google.com as well if this was an issue.
We definitely feel that we should be ranking higher on Google.co.uk.
Does anyone have any ideas what the iproblems could be?
Cheers,
Chris.
-
"the US rankings are still very strong, so for any Penguin penalisation wouldnt it be applied equally across all indexes?"
I'm not sure - I think the updates are usually language based as Google phrases it along the lines of "1% of English language queries will be affected" - but tapshop321 is UK-based so who knows...
"With the explosion of the band, again if this was a a major factor, wouldnt we have dropped equally on Google.com ?"
It's just a hunch but I'd say no, perhaps based on the above, quality of links from either country and potentially hundreds of other factors.
If I was you I'd write occasional guest articles, with a link back to onedirection.net, for other related UK websites - fansites or official sites of similar bands perhaps. I wouldn't bother too much with getting exact match anchor text - if you use your URL you have the match anyway and you don't want your link profile to be too heavily waited towards one phrase, just in case (even though you should naturally get 'one direction' matches). Mix it up a bit if you go ahead, with URL links and phrases like 'one direction fansite'. Even just a mention of One Direction in these articles could help.
Have you interviewed One Direction or similar UK bands? If you could, they're likely to link to the interview on your site.
If you haven't already, perhaps setting up Google+ Authorship would help too.
-
With SEO, you can never be certain. Since I don't have firsthand experience in it, I can't promise anything and neither can anyone else who doesn't(have firsthand experience). However, it never hurts to try. It's all about giving google the correct signals and hoping it picks up on them and it is what it's looking for.
-
I'll take a look at Ahrefs - never used it before, thanks.
Press release might be a good idea. So looking at everything as a whole, the main issue just might be the percentage of .com links compared to .co.uk links?
Chris.
-
We did have a drop in traffic in April from Penguin, but the US rankings are still very strong, so for any Penguin penalisation wouldnt it be applied equally across all indexes? Ah, well spotted on that site - we'll get that link removed straight away - in fact I thought that was already gone.
With the explosion of the band, again if this was a a major factor, wouldnt we have dropped equally on Google.com ?
Thanks for your help.
-
I personally prefer Ahrefs due to the more frequently updated and larger sized index, plus the interface and graphs are great.
If they have only dropped on google.co.uk, while I don't have personal experience with it and it's just theoretical hear-say and common sense, google has been moving in a direction to personalize search results even more, in which case it might be explained by your small percentage of backlinks from UK websites. (https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/onedirection.net)
You can do a press release targeted to UK, and see if that makes any difference. Make the Press Release LSI related to one direction, UK, and have your website mentioned in there, preferably in a link and in a sentence containing UK.
-
That could be an issue. Was it targeted to the UK before?
Looking further into it, the Penguin updates throughout the year (the first in April) don't match directly with the timing of drops you mentioned, but some of your "one direction" exact match anchor text links could have been devalued. The site-wide footer link here for example, on a completely unrelated website (that's a big no-no in Google's eyes): http://www.tapshop321.com/blog/
How about the explosion in popularity of the band? Your Domain and Page Authority is lower than most of the results on the first 3 pages. This is worldwide but illustrates the point - there will be a lot more competition from other sites now: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=one%20direction&cmpt=q
-
Hi Bernita,
Rankings for other keywords have also dropped too, only on Google.co.uk though.
Did you look at this in OpenSite Explorer? We did remove a number of site-wide links that we thought might be causing a problem, and these were taken off about 3 months ago.
Wouldn't this also effect Google.com rankings though? This is what is confusing us.
-
Hi Alex,
Yes the site is registered on Webmaster Tools, and no it doesnt have any geo-targeting set. We did experiment with this a few months back, but it has been reset to nothing for the last 2 months.
We definitely don't want to lose US traffic.
Chris.
-
Did your rankings just start falling for "one direction" or related keywords as well?
I've noticed recently that google has started "penalizing" websites for specific keywords only, leaving the remaining keywords untouched.
I took a quick peek and your backlinks for "one direction" at a domain level are higher than "onedirection.net". I'd try and fix that by getting the anchors changed or building new links.
-
Is the site registered with Google Webmaster Tools? If so, is it geo-targeted to a particular country? Do you have links from other UK sites? Do you have a physical UK address you could list as a contact on the site?
Be aware you might lose some US traffic if you do decide to change/set a location, though you can still target a particular country and rank well in others.
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.ie returning more and more UK based results, why?
I have discovered the most infuriating issue with Google Search for Irish users and it seems to be getting increasingly worse in the last 2 years or so. This is not only frustrating as a business owner (in fact it could bring a business to its knees) but it is rage inducing as a consumer.
International SEO | | Secrets
Google knows the location where I am searching from and I'm using google.ie yet I still get just a small number of Irish websites usually followed by eBay and Amazon results then a never ending list of websites that are based in the United Kingdom. Now, I know the one thing that we all have in common is the use of the English language, however what we don't have in common is shipping costs. In order to slightly increase the number of Irish based companies I need to add in the phrase 'Ireland' to my search (on google.ie in Ireland) and this makes only a small difference. In fact, oftentimes Google seems to throw in the odd American or Australian site just to really wind me up.
It's completely absurd that Google rarely returns results for .ie websites or irish based websites when searching in Ireland. Many UK companies don't ship to Ireland (including many of the eBay and Amazon results). This is killing Irish businesses who have the products and cheaper or free shipping and many how are working damn hard on their SEO are still being passed up for companies that have nothing to do with our economy.... Why oh why is this happening.0 -
Country subfolders showing as sitelinks in Google, country targeting for home page no longer working
Hi There, Just wondering if you can help. Our site has 3 region versions (General .com, /ie/ for Ireland and /gb/ for UK), each submitted to Google Webmaster Tools as seperate sites with hreflang tags in the head section of all pages. Google was showing the correct results for a few weeks, but I resubmitted the home pages with slight text changes last week and something strange happened, though it may have been coincidental timing. When we search for the brand name in google.ie or google.co.uk, the .com now shows as the main site, where the sitelinks still show the correct country versions. However, the country subdirectories are now appearing as sitelinks, which is likely causing the problem. I have demoted these on GWT, but unsure as to whether that will work and it seems to take a while for sitelink demotion to work. Has anyone had anything similar happen? I thought perhaps it was a markup issue breaking the head section so that Google can no longer see the hreflangs pointing to each other as alternates. I checked the source code in w3 validator and it doesn't show any errors. Anyway, any help would be much appreciated - and thanks to anyone who gets back, it's a tricky type of issue to troubleshoot. Thanks, Ro
International SEO | | romh0 -
How To Rank A UK Website On Google.com (US)
Hi, I've done some research on this but couldn't find any definitive answer I can trust! We have a client who resides in the UK. They have '.com' domain, hosted on a UK server, using UK spelling. Their business objective for this year is to expand in the USA, including the opening of a warehouse over there. They are wanting us to rank their website on both Google.co.uk and Google.com (North America); besides changing the geolocation settings in GWT's, and building links from .com websites is there anything else we can do to increase their visibility on Google.com? Many thanks in advance, appreciated!
International SEO | | Webpresence
Lee.0 -
If I redirect based on IP will Google still crawl my international sites if I implement Hreflang
We are setting up several international sites. Ideally, we wouldn't set up any redirects, but if we have to (for merchandising reasons etc) I'd like to assess what the next best option would be. A secondary option could be that we implement the redirects based on IP. However, Google then wouldn't be able to access the content for all the international sites (we're setting up 6 in total) and would only index the .com site. I'm wondering whether the Hreflang annotations would still allow Google to find the International sites? If not, that's a lot of content we are not fully benefiting from. Another option could be that we treat the Googlebot user agent differently, but this would probably be considered as cloaking by the G-Man. If there are any other options, please let me know.
International SEO | | Ben.JD0 -
For a website in portuguese what would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br
Hello We are a company with a website in several languages, one of them is portuguese. Our market is 2 times bigger in Brazil than in Portugal, but obviously Brazil has more potential in the future. In domain.com we have our main site in English. What would you use? pt.domain.com, br.domain.com or domain.com.br? In the first case, it means just portuguese, in the second Brazil but it is not geolocalized, and in the third, you are almost ignoring Portugal users... Duplicating content, doesn't seem to make sense... The content is basically international, so it is just the language that matters. Any help will be very much appreciated.
International SEO | | forex-websites0 -
Are my translated pages damaging my ranking?
Hi there, I have a site in English but with duplicates in different languages. The first problem is that these translated versions of my site receive no ranking on google stars (while the english does) - why is this? The second problem is that SEOmoz counts the errors on my site and then duplicates this error count for all the translated versions of my site - meaning I have a huge amount of errors (too many on-page links). Add this to the fact that I use affilite ID´s to track different types of traffic to my site - so all page urls in english and other languages, with an affiliate id on the end of the url, count as an error. This means I have a huge amount of on page errors indicated by SEOmoz, plus no ranking for my translated pages - I think this is really harming my overall ranking and site trust. What are your opinions on this?
International SEO | | sparkit0 -
IP Redirection vs. cloaking: no clear directives from Google
Hi there, Here is our situation:we need to force an IP Redirection for our US users to www.domain.com and at the same time we have different country-specific subfolders with thei own language such as www.domain.com/fr. Our fear is that by forcing an IP redirection for US IP, we will prevent googlebot (which has an US IP) from crawling our country-specific subfolders. I didn't find any clear directives from Google representatives on that matter. In this video Matt Cutts says it's always better to show Googlebot the same content as your users http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw&noredirect=1, but on the other hand in that other video he says "Google basically crawls from one IP address range worldwide because (they) have one index worldwide. (They) don't build different indices, one for each country". This seems a contradiction to me... Thank you for your help !! Matteo
International SEO | | H-FARM0 -
Google Webmaster Tools - International SEO Geo-Targeting site with Worldwide rankings
I have a client who already has rankings in the US & internationally. The site is broken down like this: url.com (main site with USA & International Rankings) url.com/de url.com/de-english url.com/ng url.com/au url.com/ch url.com/ch-french url.com/etc Each folder has it's own sitmap & relative content for it's respective country. I am reading in google webmaster tools > site config > settings, the option under 'Learn More': "If you don't want your site associated with any location, select Unlisted." If I want to keep my client's international rankings the way it currently is on url.com, do NOT geo target to United States? So I select unlisted, right? Would I use geo targeting on the url.com/de, url.com/de-english, url.com/ng, url.com/au and so on?
International SEO | | Francisco_Meza0