Disappeared from Google UK: Big Mistake

[crazydog]

Hi All,

I run an online store selling skate gear and it has been going very well over the last few years, appearing in search engines in top position or top 3 for our main keywords (on main google as well as UK). Due to an increase in demand for the site we had to change hosts a month ago (we need a large bandwidth). We couldn't find a UK host with the kind of bandwidth we needed along with various other things but we found it in USA no problem.

We've only now just discovered, after trying to work out why our sales have been down, that we have dropped out of google UK results.

We use a .com domain but appeared in google UK results because our old host was UK based. We didn't think of this at the time.

90% of our business is from the UK and while people will just type in what they are looking for we are losing a lot of traffic from not being associated with the UK.

We own the .co.uk domain as well but we don't have anything on it, just a holding page it doesn't even redirect.

Our .com domain is many years old and established and our .co.uk domain has nothing pointing to it and is only 6 months old.

We are very happy with our new hosts, it's been a long time since we had hosting that worked with us so would rather not move.

What can we do to get our UK listings back?

I don't want to ditch the .com domain due to it being established.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[SkinnerW]

Set your .co.uk domain to redirect to the main .com site - this way you have a chance to gain back some of your UK traffic.

Here is the thread with the instructions how to do that: http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com/p...html#post40337

[crazydog]

Thanks. I'll do that now.

I would like more than a chance of getting it back. Is there anything else I can do?

[Resonate]

Go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ if you have an account great if not get one, navigate to Tools & then Set geographic target
select your default business location here to which your website relates to.

[crazydog]

Thanks. That's great. I didn't know about the google webmaster tools.

I've done both things. Should that solve my problems completely or should I really be looking for a UK host?

Thanks so much.

[Resonate]

Thanks. That's great. I didn't know about the google webmaster tools.

I've done both things. Should that solve my problems completely or should I really be looking for a UK host?

Thanks so much.

Personally i think the UK host will solve all problems that can & would be.

[OldDarkstarAccount]

Get links from sites based in UK to improve your chances...

[OldWelshGuy]

All the above, get some Uk links pointing all over the site, not just to your home pahge. try to get some newspaper links (sites owned by neswpapers). classified sites are good for this.

make sure you have your bricks and mortar adress IN FULL ie 123 a road, a town, a county, england, UK Postcode. Submit and verify your site in google local. There are other things that can be done, but I am not going to make them all public obviously

[crazydog]

Hi,

Thanks for all the suggestions. I've been doing all of the above but no change yet. It may be early days. Any idea how long the geographic location thing in google takes to work? I've also located the business on google maps (it says 4 weeks for this to update). I've submitted to lots of specific local directories. Because the business is based in the UK, many of the natural links built up are UK based. If you google the company name within the UK, there are lots of websites linking to the site. Problem is when you type in keywords as my site is not be presented in google UK I may as well not exist.

As my .com has a good pagerank, is well established and lots of links I don't want to lose it.

I was thinking if I hosted the main site on the .co.uk domain but put a redirect on the .com domain to .co.uk would this work? Would the pagerank, high search engine position etc be transferred to the .co.uk domain?

I really don't want to change back to UK hosting as it is very difficult to find what I want and I really don't want to go down the dedicated server route.

Thanks for all your help. If you can think of anything else let me know.

[OldWelshGuy]

The google webmaster tools locator will work, do NOT move the content from the .com or you are likely to lose all your trust factor with google. I am not sure how you changed hosting, what method you used etc, but that might also have hurt you.

pm me your url I will take a look.