Oct 10, 2006
It's long been known that in order to rank in a country specific Google, such as Google New Zealand or Google UK, you need to have one of 2 things. Either have a domain name relating to that country (eg .nz or .uk) or have the website hosted in that country.With this in mind, I have always made sure that when a new site is launched, it meets one of these criteria to be found in the appropriate country. But up until now, I haven't needed to move a website into the country-specific results - and I wasn't sure how long this took for Google to notice the change.
So having now moved the ragepank.com site from hosting in the USA to New Zealand, and also moving another .com site on New Zealand hosting to Australia, I was interested to see how Google responds.
The Results, 4 days in
I was impressed at how quickly Google reacted to ragepank.com - already the site is appearing in google.co.nz (NZ sites only) results. But what is interesting is that the pages aren't the ones I would expect.I checked the rankings for "SEO Checklist" where I currently rank number 6 on google.com
And now has a ranking of number 1 on google.co.nz
While it makes total sense that google.com picks up a PR6 page titled "SEO Checklist" for this query, I thought it a bit odd that google.co.nz picked up a PR5 page that only mentions "SEO Checklist" once. This same thing happens on several other searches, including the homepage not being found in a NZ search for "ragepank".
A quick look at cache dates confirms the obvious - google has not cached all pages since the server move. Those pages it has cached are now appearing in NZ results.
This isn't totally surprising, but I had always thought the country check was on a per-site basis. Based on what I have found, it now seems to be on a per page basis.
Is this significant?
Does this open up any opportunities? As someone who maintains several multi-language sites, I'm wondering at the possibility of having different parts of my site hosted in different countries. It's obvious that you can host a subdomain on a different server to your main site, but what about a subfolder? There may be some tricky apache config you can apply to achieve this result.All speculation of course, but I might give it a try.
Related to this was an experiment a friend tried by hosting a .co.nz site in Australia. You would assume that this site could be found in both the google.co.nz searches and the google.com.au searches. After 6 months of testing this, the site was in google.co.nz only, and was not being found in google.com.au - So indicating a site (or with what I now know, a page) can only be found in one country-specific Google.
This knowledge is very important when you are trying to launch a service in specific countries, and especially when you are going for cheap .com domains and cheap US hosting. Anyone with a .com site hosted in America is not going to be found in a country specific search, so this is worth watching out for.
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Comments
Harvey - Mar 12, 2007
Hi Peter,
I have done this on a company website when it changed name. We purchased a new domain and 301ed all the traffic from our old, well ranking domain to the new, not ranking at all one.
Rankings totally dived for around 6 months, then came back to normal again.
It wasn't fun at all, but what choice do you have? In our case, we can't operate a new company with the old company's domain name.
While you are thinking about it, I would suggest getting the .uk site hosted, pointing some links to it and try to get it ranking in it's own right over 3 - 6 months. When the site is a little more established, then do your 301.
Some people say that they see no change in rankings, others say their rankings drop big time.
Good luck.
Harvey.
Lynn Bishop - Jul 1, 2008
I'm looking at getting NZ hosting for our .co.nz domain name, which is ranking dismally on a US server, but was concerned about dupicate content. I always believed like you that just having a .co.nz domain name was enough even on a a US server, but lately things seemed to have changed..... anyone have a site they wanna host on a US server, that we could swap hosting for... different IP, would be good for SEO purposes lol... wellworth a try....
Lynny
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Peter - Mar 12, 2007
This is really relevant for me as whilst I have a regular job, I also have a sideline business offering virtual hosting under the .nz tld. I get #1 ranking s for some relevant search terms in NZ.
But, the family is on the move to the UK. I also just happen to own the .uk version of the same domain name and would like to make that my main domain, with 301 redirects. Of course I am paranoid that my site will disappear for five years!
I am kind of hoping that Google respects the concept of "under new management" and will carry at least to some degree my rankings across to google.co.uk. But no-one seems to know for sure if this'll happen. How about y'all - any ideas?