Have you ever wondered which results Google displays when you click the box ‘pages from the UK’ or ‘páginas de España’ or any other geographically based search? 

A website is associated with a country either by its domain name or by the IP address of the server on which it is hosted. 

So if you have a .com domain and it’s hosted in France then you will not appear in a ‘pages from the UK’ search.  But if it’s a .co.uk domain then it should appear. 

For example a UK client with a .com domain selling into the UK market moved their hosting to the USA to take advantage of lower costs.  Unfortunately they found that their site disappeared from the ’search the UK’ results.   

It is not always obvious where a hosting company has its servers - a major UK hosting company has its servers in Germany.   

Of course, a lot of your potential clients will normally choose the ’search the web’ option so it won’t always matter but most small businesses would prefer not to risk losing even a small number of business opportunities.     

Therefore if your site doesn’t appear in the searches that you would expect, ask your hosting company where their servers are. 

Many small business have invested in a number of domain names.  As well as their own business name perhaps they also have a domain describing their product or the market they are in.  Not to mention the .com, .net, .fr, .co.uk, .es and various other versions of it. 

Often these domains will all be set up to point to the same web space, using the web forwarding options of the domain registrar. 

The problem with this approach is that Google penalises duplicate content on a website.  So if you are not careful all your domains could end up being penalised.  And if you are careful and redirect all the less important domains to the main domain using a permanent redirect ( or 301 redirect) then they will subsequently be ignored by the search engines (since they have been permanently redirected they are assumed to be no longer relevant). 

Our normal recommendation is to have one domain and focus your marketing budget on promoting that domain.  If you have inherited several domains then we would advise you to redirect all of them, using a permanent redirect, to your chosen main domain and again focus your marketing budget on that site.    

Many smaller businesses are very dependent on the web but don’t have the technical or financial resources to get the maximum benefit from the opportunities it presents. 

Over the years we have seen the same issues arise over and over again both with websites run by our clients in the travel business and with the sites of other small businesses. 

This blog is an attempt to highlight some of the most common situations we encounter and help the smaller business compete effectively.   

Articles will be written on an ad hoc basis so please come back to catch up on our latest views and, hopefully, comments from our readers. 

We welcome your contributions to the discussions, however in order to avoid spam all comments will be moderated.