Q and A: Why isn't our site coming up on Google for "pages from Australia"?

Dear Kalena...

We have an Australian website and until now, we have been hosted in the US. Two days ago, we moved to an Australian server, but our site is not coming up on the Australian sites yet (even if you do a Google search for Cairns Unlimited). However, we have other domain names redirected to specific pages within our site, and these come up when you search for sites from Australia. The main reason we moved to an Australian web server was to ensure that our site comes up on Google search results even if readers search for sites only from Australia. Any idea what the problem is?

Thanks for your help
Maria

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Maria

You don't say, but I'm assuming you mean your site doesn't come up when searching on Google.com.au and restricting the search to "pages from Australia"?

I've checked and here's the score:

1) Conducting a search for "Cairns Unlimited" using Google.com brings up your site in first place.

2) Conducting a search for "Cairns Unlimited" using Google.com.au selecting results from "the web" brings up your site in first place.

3) Conducting a search for "Cairns Unlimited" using Google.com.au selecting "pages from Australia" doesn't bring up your site in the first 50 matches, but it does bring up links to your site from other sites.

There could be a couple of things influencing this:

a) It's only been a few days since you made the hosting switch. The DNS entries may not have propagated across the net yet or Googlebot may not have picked up the switch yet. Google datacenters may still be storing cached versions of your pages from your old server. You should give it some more time.

b) Your site has a Google Toolbar PageRank of zero, meaning it hasn't built up enough trust-rank yet to be shown for related search queries on Google, unless you search for very specific terms such as your brand. Things might change when your PageRank improves.

c) You may have switched your hosting company from one based in the US to one based in Australia, but are you SURE the server they use to host your site isn't based in the US? We also use an Australian host but they outsource their server rackspace to a larger company in the US.

d) Even if your site is now hosted in Australia, the domain you are promoting is still a dot com domain. Google takes several things into account when determining a site's origin with server location being only one factor. It is unlikely you'll be able to outrank any sites with AU domain extensions in the regional results with a dot com domain.

e) A site with an Australian domain extension always has a better chance of being included in the regionally-specific search results and out-ranking dot com domains. I see that you also own the .com.au version of your domain but Google isn't caching it as they have determined your dot com domain to be your *correct* one. Have you thought about setting your preferred domain to the .com.au version and parking your dot com domain to that one? Or using 301s to point pages on the dot com to the .com.au? You could then update your Sitemap in your Google Webmaster Tools account to reflect pages on the .com.au domain.

Keep in mind that doing this may improve your site's results in the regional search results, but it may have the opposite effect on your site's performance in Google.com.au "web results" and the wider search results shown on Google.com. You really should decide whether the Australian market is more important to you before you make this switch. You should also keep in mind that many Australian searchers still use Google.com or Google.com.au without selecting "pages from Australia".


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