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Posted By:
AndrewGirdwood
254 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://blog.arhg.net)
Category: SEO
6 Comments
Posted By:
AndrewGirdwood
254 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://blog.arhg.net)
Category: SEO
6 Comments
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Comments
"His solution looks like a plug in piece of technology that makes it look as if your site is in the UK (for example) even if your server is in the States."
It'll be very interesting to see how Google view this in the context of their guidelines on 'misleading practices'.
Actually, I've talked to both Google and Yahoo engineers about geolocation issues for quite some time (it's my specialty) and they indicated very clearly that this type of approach is acceptable.
For example, the Akamai server (which Yahoo and Google both use) uses a similar system for providing content to local visitors, it just does so in a very search UN-friendly method. You end up with the opposite issue - one website appearing to be hosted on multiple IP's all over the world. As a matter of fact, working on the Akamai issue on behalf of the Canadian government was one of the things that led me to the current system.
The bottom line is that you are allowed to host anywhere you want. You can also set up your servers anywhere you want. All I'm providing is a way to your your preferred servers to host in your preferred location - the best of both worlds.
The only way this could be seen as spam is if you were using it to try to change your Class "C" IP in order to have related sites appear from different owners, and people are doing that now just by asking their ISP's for a different Class "C". But by itself a Class C is not spam - it's how you use it.
Google *wants* to know where you are targeting. If they actually cared about where you hosted they would not assign geolocation to ccTLD's, allowing you to host in the US (for example) but to be seen as a UK site (with a .co.uk) If that's not considered spam (and it's not) then this system isn't either.
If anything, trying to target a UK audience without any attempt to tell Google that you are relevant to the UK is what would be considered misleading, but it's not - lots of companies hosted in the US with .coms do it all the time.
It would be very useful to me to see what you felt was "misleading" about any of this, so I could address it directly. It's easy to suggest that anything anyone does to a website to rank better is misleading or spam (there are many people who argue all SEO is by definition misleading and therefore spam) but honestly it needs to be more than that. You can't possibly be suggesting that changing hosts (which is the net effect of this) is misleading to anyone.
Do you have a specific scenario in mind that would potentially confuse Google as to the content or targeting of the site? There certainly is no duplication issue, and human visitors see everything about the site exactly how the search engines see it.
Ian
Hi Ian,
Thanks for the detailed response. Just to quickly clarify, I agree with you that the technique would be useful rather than misleading - my point was that you just never know how Google will interpret what you're doing (unless of course you've been in discussion with their engineers of course!).
With regards your 'spam' point, the confusion might possibly arise not at Google's end, but from the user's. From a usability point of view, if I perform a Google 'pages from the UK search' I aim to find UK sites, not sites that are targeting the UK - there's a big difference. When I'm searching for a local UK software developer, do I really want Google deluging me with 1001 Indian and Chinese developers trying to shill their services to me?
That's a good point, of course. It's not related directly to this technology because of course those same 1001 sits could all just as easily buy .us domains or host .coms' at cheap (or even free) hosting services in the US and accomplish the same goal. As a matter of fact they could probably do it cheaper.
My system is really aimed at the serious international businesses that find themselves stuck for one reason or another (could be internal politics, could be CMS issues, etc) with a generic TLD and don't want to host in other countries for whatever reasons. Sometimes it's as simple as them not wanting their credit card or user profile database physically located in a country where they may not have the same privacy laws, for example. EU users would be a classic example of this. These are the4 firms that would be best helped by this technology. Because I have to pay for Tier 1 hosting in a LOT of different countries, provide unique IP's bandwidth, etc, this will not be a free service. But it will be cheaper than companies like those could do themselves. So I suspect this would not be the most popular choice for would-be spammers - it's really aimed at my clients (who I developed the system for) and other businesses and organizations with their needs.
More to your point, I agree that in theory you may want to divide your results from"targeting my country" and "from my country" but in general I don't think the average searcher would (in my opinion).
The reason is, for example, what is a better result to a UK user looking for shoes - a UK based company that primarily sells to China, or a Chinese company that specifically targets and ships to the UK? I think most users looking for shoes in the UK would say the later. This might sound odd but in reality most exporters are by definition more appropriate results outside their own country than inside it.
I've noticed that Google seems to be addressing your issue, however. In the last 6 months or so, I've seen a trend towards needing a geotargetted site AND geotargetted links. The idea is that if a site has a lot of links from the UK, then it's probably relevant to people from the UK.
This is an idea borrowed from Yahoo and Ask, who have been doing this for quite a while, and I think it's going to continue, as it would make sense that a site that is geotargetted to an area and has geotargetted links is a better result than simply a geotargetted site. Many sites are accidentally geotargetted. It's often a huge surprise to some people when you tell them that their .cc domain is geotargetting them to the CoCos' Islands, and therefore they can't geotarget the US or any other country as well as a result. Heck, many people don't even know you can geotarget in the first place! Adding links into the equation could help with this.
Basically, I'm offering one important piece of the puzzle, but links still matter :)
Ian
Some great comments from the pair of you! Thanks!
You're right Ian, there is definitely a corporate market for this kind of service. As you say, most spammers have easier options open to them which will achieve the same result.
Good luck with it.