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Telling Google which country your business trades in

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2009-01-02 09:23:55 - Graham Ellis

I have a solution the the question I asked last September - which country do the search engines think we are in?. It seems that Google takes the top level domain name if it's geographic ... and otherwise it uses the IP address of the server to give it guidance. But there's another was of tuning this, which is in the webmaster tools. See here. However, Google's page tells us that this only effects ranking on advanced searches where the user calls up for certain countries only.

Up until Summer, 2008 our server was located in the USA and our top level domain - .net - gave no clue that we were primarily UK / European. At a move of server (we needed to be on a dedicated server anyway with our traffic levels and need for flexibility), we chose a hosting company who have their computers in London, partly to get fast local responses with the trans Atlantic lag and partly to appear to be in the UK. And it was noticeable that the proportion of UK:USA traffic changed, and in the right direction too.

As a further (final) stage, we've altered that Google setting ... and I'm glad that we've solved something that was quite tricky to find the answers on!


Diagram shows where current traffic to our web site originates from. See source code and resultant graphic from our example of visits from Europe. Subject covered on our PHP techniques workshop