SEO Question - International Domain

authoritydomains · December 20, 2010, 11:53:15 PM

Hi All,
First post here and I am hoping you guys can help me out . I am looking to buy/market an international domain. However, I want to rank the domain in the USA and wont be doing anything "local" for that domain extension. The domain is more of a cool word or phrase spelled out using the country code. Think "Delicious" or Bit.ly etc.

Anyhow, I think it should go fine so long as its hosted in the USA with a US address and links from here etc. Are there any pitfalls that I may run into from your experience?

Thanks in advance!

authoritydomains · December 21, 2010, 05:27:18 PM

Cool thanks yeah just wanted to double check with others before plowing ahead lol.

Rupert · January 14, 2011, 07:57:15 AM

I have never had any problems with internationals ranking in the US, provided it is hosted there.

I can only speak from experience for .net, and .co.uk

Oh, and ranking .tv in the UK.

I do see all sorts of others in the UK too. (.biz .org etc)

Jasons word is stronger than mine

Rupert · January 14, 2011, 10:51:31 AM

No, you have spent more time messing about with things like that, while I keep trying to sell suits

Torben · January 14, 2011, 01:18:09 PM

Any of you have any hard evidence as to whether or not local IP has any significance?

With TLD's like .com you can set the geographical target in WebMaster tools. If I on top of that the language of the content is English does it really matter if the site is hosted in Afghanistan? Lets pretend that the load time from Afghanistan is not an issue ;-)

Rupert · January 14, 2011, 01:58:35 PM

I am going back 4 years now, when a .net, hosted in Germany, in English, and flagged as UK in the tools available at the time (I don't think webmaster tools were so advance3d then)

...just disappeared from the UK listings.

so I think it is a case of get as many boxes ticked as you can, and hosting in the country you are targeting is not essential, but it is a big tick in the box.

Rumbas · January 14, 2011, 02:57:27 PM

Interesting Rupert. What if the domain was a co.uk?

Matt once said that they have 3 indicators; ip, ccTLD and language.

So in the above example a co.uk or UK hosting would probably have kept it ranking?

Rupert · January 14, 2011, 03:37:31 PM

Yes, that ties in with my experience.

The owner moved it to UK ranking and it fired up again. (He was extremely cross about going for the cheap German hosting

)

I have .co.uks that are hosted in the US, and have never had an issue.

Adam C · January 19, 2011, 05:35:28 PM

Quote from: Torben on January 14, 2011, 01:18:09 PM
Any of you have any hard evidence as to whether or not local IP has any significance?

Related/excuse me whilst I go slightly off-piste....

I've long wanted to verify whether the combination of local TLD and local hosting is greater than the sum of one of the parts.

i.e.

lets say you're targeting the UK market. You have 3 options:

use a .co.uk
host in the UK with a generic TLD (lets not factor in the .tv's, .ly's etc. for now)
use a .co.uk AND host in the UK

Now, do all 3 pack the same punch or is one more powerful?

Generally, I would opt for a local domain at least.

I've also seen, for a .co.uk domain, a correlation in the moving of a host out of the UK coincide with a drop in rankings. After moving it back rankings improved.

This wasn't a clean test for testings sake - and other factors may have contributed to the improvement in rankings, but the initial drop correlated very very closely.

Based on this, I'm inclined to believe that the more signals you can give the better, but would be interested to hear if anyone had any similar or conflicting experiences.

Torben · January 19, 2011, 09:44:05 PM

>I've also seen, for a .co.uk domain, a correlation in the moving of a host out of the UK coincide with a drop in rankings. After moving it back rankings improved.

How long did it takt for Google to react on the change of IP?

We have a UK site on a co.uk domain. It's an old site and we haven't touched it for a long time. I'm going to move to a UK host and I wont change anything until I hopefully see and improvement in rankings. This will be a 100% clean test.

Gurtie · January 20, 2011, 09:07:01 AM

I would day local domain before hosting, but I try and host in the right place. Within mainland Europe I suspect the boundaries are quite blurry though.

Have also had something recently which has implied that the wrong language specified in metas etc (in this instamce it was meta, webtrends tag and a variable within the url all set to non uk-en) made a difference, When the wrong info was removed the rankings improved a small amount. Hosting and tld remained the same. I was making some other changes and building links as well but *all* rankings lifted marginally which was probably not related to the other work.

That said, I wouldn't say that was because we put the right one in, more because we took the wrong one out - if you see what I mean!

Rupert · January 20, 2011, 09:31:31 AM

This conversation has just high lighted a problem with multi language domains sites that it out there. If you go for a platform like Magento, then you can host a German, French, Dutch etc domain on the same platform, with different TLDs.

What you cannot do is have different IP address though, out of the box. It is beyond my skills to even know if you could run it all off one database, and then yuk, I am sure there would be security issues.

Can it be done do you think?

I wonder if Magento is aware of the possible issue... I somehow doubt it.

Adam C · January 20, 2011, 10:02:14 AM

Quote from: Torben on January 19, 2011, 09:44:05 PM
How long did it takt for Google to react on the change of IP?

Days

Gurtie · January 20, 2011, 11:12:19 AM

Quote from: Rupert on January 20, 2011, 09:31:31 AM

Can it be done do you think?

I have exactly this problem now. Cost wise client needs a single CMS license. SEO wise I want entirely seperate sites/hosting. I'm wondering if we could use a single CMS on one server without making the output public and then publish flat copies of the sites to different servers on a scheduled basis. Site is non transactional and not very frequently updated so I think it should be possible, but it seems to be a reasonable amount of hassle from what the techies are saying.

Torben · January 20, 2011, 01:38:02 PM

>Can it be done do you think?
I you have your own server or VPS anything is possible.

Forget about using a control panel and just edit httpd.conf manually. All you have to do is set up a virtual host for every IP but point it to the same folder on the webserver.

Alternatively (not sure if it will work) you point your different WAN IP's to the same LAN IP. i.e. 69.73.139.118 and 69.73.139.119 would both point to 10.0.0.1

> I am sure there would be security issues
Cant think of any