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. 

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 7:46 pm and is filed under Website Hosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.