Q and A: What can I do to improve the rank of my regional domain on Google.com?

Dear Kalena...

My question is on regional google sites. I have a .com.au and rank well on google.com.au when selecting 'search web' and 'search australian sites' but my rank on google.com is very bad. I would have assumed that the results for google.com and google.com.au 'search the web' would have been the same? What can I do to improve my google.com rank, perhaps I could register a .com and point it to my .com.au? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, thanks for offering this service by the way :)

Tim

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Tim

First up, never assume anything with Google. Secondly, search engines use a few different methods to determine a site's country of origin. Here are just two:

1) IP address the site resides on (physical location of host servers)
2) Domain extension

The physical location of the server that stores your site can have an impact on how search engines treat your site. Even if your site is hosted by an Australian firm, if they use server space located in another country, that is usually the country search engines will associate with your site. Check with your host about server location if this is an issue for you.

Now about your specific example - think about who uses Google.com.au - the primary users are from Australia, correct? So why would Google show the same results to Australian users that they would show to users of Google.com? They (correctly) assume that Australians want to see results that are relevant to them. So Google naturally gives preference to sites with a .com.au domain extension or sites that are hosted in Australia for both regional searches and "search the web" searches on Google.com.au.

Not only that, but Google uses IP detection to determine a searcher's geographical location and present results they determine relevant for persons in that location. How else do you think they decide what AdWords ads to show to different searchers? Advertisers request their ads to be shown to specific regions, countries or towns, so Google have a highly sophisticated algorithm to make sure this happens automatically.

If it is really vital that your site be shown more prominently on Google.com, I would suggest moving your site to a .com domain, on a server located in the US. You could then 301 redirect your .com.au domain to the .com. Pointing a .com to a .com.au won't do anything because you are still instructing bots that the .com.au site is your primary domain. I would really only consider switching domains if your major market is the US, the Australian market is relatively unimportant to you and you are happy to lose visibility in Google.com.au, which is what would inevitably happen.

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