Question

Topic: SEO/SEM

Search Results By Country?

Posted by Veslebert on 9/23/2006 at 4:24 AM ET 125 Points
Dear friends
I have a company in Spain whose clients are mostly abroad (say France, Germany and UK mainly), and my page is a .com hosted in Spain.

I heard that the search engines give priority to the pages hosted in the country where the searching person is. That is, if somebody in Germany types a search, the first results that will show up correspond to pages hosted in Germany as .com or as .de.

The question is: is this true?

Best regards,
Alberto
Spain

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RESPONSES

  • Posted by ReadCopy on 9/23/2006 at 4:48 AM Accepted
    Yes and No :-)

    Like most country users, someone searching "Google" for example, has the ability (via radio buttons below the search box) to search "the Web", "In their native language", "or sites from a particular country".

    So in Spain you have "la Web", "páginas en español" and "páginas de España" ...

    "la Web" will search all sites, no matter on what language they are in or what country the website is hosted.

    "páginas en español" will search sites in Spanish OR Hosted in Spain

    "páginas de España" will only search sites hosted in Spain

    To be honest, the magority of people searching the internet search on "the web", so you will be included in the majority of search results. I had one client in Spain who wanted to be No. 1 for "páginas de España" and it was only when I pointed out she was hosted in Japan, did she realise why I couldn't achieve it for her.

    A key issue here is to work with a reliable hosting company. Many hosting servers are actually blocked or banned from big search engine providers because of the poor or almost 100% adult content of the servers or the particular server IP address is known for spamming!

    Rule of thumb for international sites, don't worry too much about where you are hosted, if it is really important to you, then invest in mirror sites hosted in different countries, but REALLY DON'T worry about it.

    If you want to talk about optimisation of your site, usability and online marketing, then contact me offline :-)

    I hope that this helps and good luck.

  • Posted by excellira on 9/23/2006 at 9:26 PM Accepted
    The search engine's primary goal is to provide the most relevant results. Who wants to use a SE that doesn’t provide good results? So, if the searcher’s IP address is in Spain, and the search is in Spanish, then logically, the best result would be a Spanish TLD from a server in Spain right?

    You do not want to make the searcher select “the entire web”. You may be marketing to a smaller subset of users if you do. Maybe not. You want to get ranked with whatever tool that is the most widely used in your market, and in the most widely used configuration. In other words: what are your users using to find your terms?

    With that said, the first thing I would do is to pick your best search terms. The ones with the highest search volume with the least competition (some talk about KEI but sometimes you can miss good keywords focusing on KEI alone). Perhaps you have some experience with those keywords and you know which of those have the best conversion rate.

    Now, do a search on each of those terms. Use the search tool that is predominantly used in your market (regardless of the location or size of your market). Now look at the top ten results for each of those terms and notice the TLD. Are they .com or .de or .eu or etc. This will answer one question.

    The next step is to find the IP address and location of the servers. If they are all in Spain (or not) you will have your next answer.

    If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me

    -Greg
  • Posted by ReadCopy on 9/24/2006 at 1:29 PM Member
    "You do not want to make the searcher select “the entire web”"

    This option is selected by default and my research has suggested that almost 97 percent of business users do not change this default for their searches, hence, no real need to bother looking at localised hosting.

    Andrew
  • Posted by ReadCopy on 9/25/2006 at 4:22 AM Member
    "it isn't really a good idea to simply mirror or clone the content across both (you can be penalized for this, supposedly)"

    If Google finds clones of mirrors of an exisiting site it finds in its index it simply shows you the oldest (and therefore original) site.
  • Posted by Veslebert on 9/27/2006 at 5:04 AM Author
    Hi friends
    Thanks for your information

    The beauty of internet is that there is not something straight like 2+2=4, but a lot of "more or less".

    So I´m checking the conditions of different registrars. There is an interesting recent article in the latest EntireWeb newsletter titled "Purchasing Domain Names - What You Should Know".

    With all this input I can move ahead more confident.
    Thanks again,
    Alberto
    Spain
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