Forum Advice Is Not Always Good Advice

Today I was reading a webmaster forum - Webmasterworld. The thread was entitled:

“.com site not showing on google.co.uk“.

I was a little interested as I have a few .com sites hosted in the UK and thought I’d have a quick read to see if there had been some changes in the SERPS or algo.

A summary of the posters problem is when he selects ‘pages from the UK’ in google.co.uk his site is nowhere to be found though it shows up fine when it isn’t selected plus it reads like he’s not hosting in the UK either.

I sat laughing at some of the replies.

301s, UK based content, buy the .co.uk are three that come to mind.

Firstly let me say that very very few of the referrals I see in my log files come from people who hit ‘pages from the UK’ and I see thousands of these in my logs. It is less than 0.2% and that is on a good day.

If the site is showing up on google.co.uk it is time to stop worrying about trying to get listed in the ‘pages from the UK’ section to get 1 extra visitor a month.

So let’s compare this situation to a site of mine.

stacy-keibler-pictures.com is hosted on a UK server. The keyphrase ‘stacy keibler pictures‘ ranks #1 on google.co.uk, press the ‘pages from the UK’ and it still ranks #1. On most of the datacentres here it ranks #2. The site also ranks highly for many other keywords and phrases. There are few sites, if any, from the UK linking to it, she is also an American so none of the content is UK focused.

The simple answer is host it in the UK. Job done.

But hold on a minute - it has two hyphens in it with three keywords - that can’t rank, too spammy, too this, too that.

Bollocks.

I’m not suggesting that all advice on forums is useless but a lot of it is and you need to troll around for a bit and figure out the speculators from the knowledgeable members. Add to that the ‘I know but I can’t tell you’ type posters and the ‘my dick is bigger than yours’ types but hey that is another post in itself.