Google UK Doesn’t Like Your Homepage
It was last year when I first heard about Google UK having a preference for .co.uk sites in their index. The thinking is if you want good rankings in Google UK (or MSN UK for that matter) your site needed to have a .co.uk domain extension. However, there were .com sites in the UK indexes and while they may not have outranked their .co.uk counterparts, they were there.
Fast-forward to today and you find a post on SEOmoz indicating this may no longer be the case. According to Rebecca Kelley, (who is definitely not an uggo) some UK hosted - .com index pages have been disappearing from Google UK’s index when a site:search is performed with the “sites only from UK” filter. Kelley goes on to say she experimented with a number of sites and the only time this occurred was when the aforementioned filter was active.
Has for an explanation into this phenomenon, right now there isn’t a solid one. Is Google so strictly adhering to its preference for sites with co.uk extensions they are scorching the earth (well, their UK index) of UK sites with .com extensions?
Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog
All me testing and experiance shows you should either host in the UK or have the co.uk extension to have results in Google.co.uk. Of course having both would be the best case scenario.
This is nothing NEW! This info has been around for probably over 2 years old now.
Read more here:
http://www.uk-web-hosting-directory.org/
Been struggling since early october to find out whats happened to my .uk.com site since been dropped from uk index and think the above article may explain why (my web pro world post linked below). Very frustrating since ive had top UK rankings for last 5 years with .uk.com domain which is so obviously a UK specific domain even though, i have just found out, not a Top Level Domain.
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=68953&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
I had 1 page in SERPS for months, then slid to page 8 then vanished. No Black Hat tactics just disappeared after the October update. The above is the only explanation can offer.