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The problem

One of our client’s website uses a .net domain name but their business is UK based and so too are their target customers. Therefore it’s essential that their site appears under UK Google filtered search results, however this was not happening. The site would appear in first position under global searches but not at all when filtered to UK websites only.

Possible causes of the problem

Upon investigation into the problem it appeared that there could be a number of reasons as to why this could be happening.

1. The site is not using a .co.uk domain suffix which is preventing Google from identifying it as a UK website. Unfortunately the .co.uk version of the domain name was not available.
2. The site is hosted on our 1&1 dedicated server which is located in Germany. The fact that the server’s locality is not in the UK could be causing Google to not include it in UK filtered searches. However we have other .net and .com domains on our server that don’t have this problem.
3. The client was concerned that the domain name had been blacklisted during a previous registration and this was the reason that it was not showing in UK results. This was not the case as domains blacklisted by Google are global, Google do not blacklist domains regionally. Therefore is the site comes up in global search results you can be sure it hasn’t been blacklisted.

The solution

In order to ensure the site would appear in Google UK regional filtered search results we ensured that the following checklist had been implemented (most of these had already been done).

1. Make sure that the geographical location of the business appear in the website page title, description and keyword meta tags. In our case it was Leighton Buzzard United Kingdom. i.e. “<title>(Company name) based in Leighton Buzzard United Kingdom </title>”
2. “United Kingdom” appears in the content of every page on the site. We added United Kingdom in the (include) footer, the footer shows on every page of the website so this would provide the maximum exposure.
3. Add the tag “<address></address>” in the contact page, and styled it using CSS. According to W3C the <address> HTML tag defines contact information for a document or a section. Also they say “The <address> tag should NOT be used as describing a postal address, unless it is a part of the contact information.” In our case we were using the tag to describe the address of the company and of course the obvious place to put the location of the website is on the contact page.
4. Add you website to Google Webmaster Tools and set the Geographic Location to the region you want your domain to be in. To achieve this follow the list below.

Adding the website’s geolocation with Google Webmaster Tools

1. Go to the Google website (http://www.google.co.uk)
2. At the bottom of the website there is a link saying “Business Solutions”, click on the link.
3. At the bottom right corner of that webpage you will see 4 links. Click in the Web Pages link.
4. You will then be taken to Google Webmaster Central, click in the Webmaster Tools (including Sitemaps).
5. You will have to log in with your Google account. If you don’t have one you will have to register.
6. Once you’ve logged in you will have to add the url of your website and click Add Site.
7. You will then need to verify that you are the owner of the website by either including a piece of code into your website, or by creating an empty file that Google generate and upload this to your website.
8. Once you’ve verified that you are the owner of the website you can start using Google Webmaster Tools, to set the geographic location you will need to click on “Tools” (Right hand side), then click on “Set geographic target”.
9. The final step is to set your geographic target to the location that your website belongs.

After implementing item 4 above our client’s website showed up in the UK Google search results within 2 weeks.

August 6th, 2008 at 1:51 pm