Hey everyone

 

I'm having a bit of trouble with one of my domains, and hopefully someone has a solution for me.

 

First of all, I am based in the UK and I have a fairly good knowledge of SEO etc. but this just has me stumped.

 

Our company has a number of domains / websites that specialise in different areas and about 6 months ago, instead of buying a .co.uk domain & UK hosting we went for a .com domain with a US hosting company as it was considerably cheaper.

 

4 months later and no rankings for our search terms on google uk (we were ranking on google.com) I did some reasearch and found that the lack of UK rankings may have been due to our site being hosted on servers in the US, and with a .com domain instead of .co.uk, google just presumed it was a US website (even though it has UK in the title tag, thoughout the site etc.)

 

First of all we set our geographic location in google webmaster tools to UK, added our site to google maps, gave it a month, still no google UK rankings.

 

We decided to bite the bullet and change from our US hosting for our .com to the UK hosting.

 

After another month our site still doesn't rank on google UK for our search terms. The site comes up when you type the company name, but that's it!

 

This has me really baffled and wondered if anyone had come across this before or if they had a solution?

 

We have a decent number of backlinks to the site so didn't want to start from scratch with a new domain, but is that the best thing to do?

 

Any advice would be appreciated, I realise this is a long-winded post, so I'll just summarise below:

 

1. .com domain name for UK site, ranks in every other countries version (US, Australia, Russia, Spain etc.....) of google except the UK google.

2. It's hosted on UK servers, has geographic location set to UK has backlinks from UK hosted websites.

3. The site ranks for the search terms in the UK versions of yahoo & msn (I know they have nothing to do with google, just saying they recognise it as a uk website).

4. Our site is built seo friendly, hence the decent rankings in other google countries.

 

Again, sorry for the long post, but would just like some help! There may be just something simple that I am missing!

 

Cheers

 

Mark

may be your site is sand-boxed

how many back links do these sites have? give me the sites and keywords your targetting and I will let you know whats going on. (PM me if you want it to be confidential)

Has Google crawled your sitemap yet - you can check if it has in webmaster tools. There might have been an error with it so check and deal with any errors.