My conundrum

[David-E-Carey]

Hi,

I'm endeavouring to see what the Moz community thinks of the current situation I'm finding one of my domains in. This issue for me tends to span most of this year so it is not impulsive in nature and I'm hoping community member(s) may good solid insights into the issue that I may have not considered.

My issue relates to the geo-location of a domain and the what the current level of priority this may be this year due to all the algorithm updates from Google.

I have a domain located in the UK with pretty much a consistently high DA, PA and root level domain links profile higher than our competitors for our target keyword phrases. Our domain is also made up of more .edu and .gov links than the others and its Moz Trust is higher. This being the case we are ranked No.1 in the UK for that phrase - great!

The problem:

• many of the competitors can be seen in Google.com and they outrank us. We outrank the same competitors with the No.1 UK slot in Google.co.uk but no where near in the US.
• none of the competitors in the Google.com have a higher DA/PA etc. many are not US companies
• Moz give's us an 'A' grade for the keyword phrase and there are no internal 'nofollows' only 'nofollows' to our social media sites on the home page. There is one H1 on the page that includes the phrase.
• We have many No1 US slots for our landing pages e.g. 'election mapping software', 'data presentation software','cancer mapping software'. Ironically the 2nd one we moved the site away from last year and now the home page makes no on page references to 'data presentation software'.
• Our rank for our target KW phrase fluctuates between 19-21 in Google.com. It moves up every so often, then along comes an algo change flagged in mozcast/algoroo and it gets knocked back down again!
• The issue seems to be around the home page of the site no other pages have this type of issue. Our page indexation with Google is at a healthy 87%.

So is this a domain geo-location problem? If our domain was hosted in the US would that change things? How can these same competitors who we out rank in the UK outrank us in the US if domain location is not a major algorithm factor? If it is a factor then it screams online digital protectionism to me - I don't think that's right but it's an frustrated emotional response (for now).

Please note, I am well aware of discussions in the past about the benefits of having your domain located in your target country. However I came to understand that these days that is less of an issue and that valued content, site authority, social signals etc. play a far more significant role in determining a site's SERPs. Just to add I do monitor the social signals of competitors and there is nothing that I would say is of a major difference to our own efforts.

Any thoughts that I should consider or ideas are welcome.

Many thanks in advance.

David

[David-E-Carey]

Thanks Chris,

I think it was around January this year that we moved away from 'data presentation software' when that was action'd the move was pretty quick and our site moved to 5th position in the US for the new term. It stayed there for a couple of weeks. As the year went on we noticed that the ranking in the US was moving away (downwards) and there seemed to be more of a determination occurring in the SERPs positions for this term when we saw algorithm changes in Mozcast and Algoroo (please note I don't get too hung up on Algo changes, it is used as a general indicator). However we did not see the same impact in the UK and other countries. In fact overall our ranks in September are much better with many more US No.1-3 ranks and 4-10 ones as well but this homepage one is our troubled rank. Reading about Google 'Hummingbird' I'm thinking has this benefited our site overall in September, well like others it has not been detrimental but why the issues in US for our home page?

However, if it can be hard to move away from and established keyword phrase then why the discrepancy between the UK and the US, what factors or algorithm indicators are causing such rank differences? Surely what is applicable in the UK also holds in the US and vice-versa. Unless that is not the case and this is where my concerns about geographic relevancy of the domain comes into play.

I like your thinking about new links that aid our re-positioning, we do this with our customer implementations on specific landing pages, especially in the local government field and yes it does work and I feel supports our SERPs in Google.

In terms of links in the US well we have many from say for example the CDC and the World Health Organization (e.g. pulled from OSE http://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/atlas/countydata/atlas.html) and over 25 US State Departments of Health, how many sites even in the US can claim to have such powerful trusted domain links?

Thanks for your input Chris much appreciated.

[Chris.Menke]

David, it can be hard to get away from a term that a site's homepage has traditionally ranked well for. It can come down to getting new links to the homepage that are able to re-position the page in the light of the new target search term (from the US, would be nice), eliminating or revising existing external links pointing to the homepage (I wouldn't disavow them though), and on linking out from the homepage (and other pages of the site) a new page optimized for that undesired term with a links containing the undesired term.

[David-E-Carey]

Hello Robert,

Thanks for coming back to me. Yes it is a .com and I actually have not selected any country in GWMT. About 4 years ago I asked Rand about this feature, he told me that they do not set this for their own site since they have a global customer base. As we have a global customer base as well I have left this option with no country target.

The ranking issue seems to have really occurred this year, pre-2013 my ranks in the US would generally be in the first page. In 2012 the primary keyword phrase of the home page was 'data presentation software' which was No1 in the US. It was felt that this was too broad in nature and hence changed. With all home page references to this phrase removed I thought that would then tell Google that this site is not geared towards that phrase. However it has now put us back to being No.1 for that phrase and the one we are aligning to at currently No.19 and stagnates around 19-21.

The only thing in the last couple of days though is I got a message from Google in GWMT that there has been a noticeable spike in soft 404s, so I'm investigating this.

Thanks though Robert for suggesting this option.

Best

David

[RobertFisher]

David,

First, let me apologize if my answer seems overly simplistic. I am assuming your domain is a .com domain as opposed to a .co.uk domain? If it is a .co.uk that could be the culprit given what you want to accomplish. But, if it is a .com, in WMT, have you set the Geographic Target? ... to the UK?

Since you want to have a site that ranks globally, you want to go to the bottom of the drop down and select unlisted.

In case you are not familiar, in the top right of GWMT you will see a gear that when you click on it will have site settings as an option. Click that. The top one is Geographic Target. Click the dropdown and at the bottom you will see "unlisted" - mark that.

Then save and you will be telling Google you do not wish to have a targeted country. Since you are in the UK, I do not believe you will see a negative effect there.

I hope this helps,

Robert