The Wardman Wire

Many UK blogs - especially political blogs, which are often on .com domain names - recieve bad results in searches done on Google’s “UK Pages”. This article explains some ways to mitigate this problem.

Stating the Problem

I summarised the of political blogs scoring badly in Google UK searches in this way:

Google has just under 80% of the UK search market. Within that 80%, four times as many Google searched are done on google.co.uk rather than google.com.

UK Political Blogs are missing out on fully 50% of the traffic they could be getting from internet searches in the UK. That is a lot of potential traffic - and engagement in political dialogue - that is being lost.

Why is there a problem

Of the “Top 100″ UK Political Blogs identified in Iain Dale’s Guide to UK Political Blogging, no less than 70% were on international domains in October 2006.

In the earlier days of the internet, an international domain (e.g., .com, .org etc) were seen as superior to uk domains, which end in .uk. Many leading political blogs are old enough to be affected by this trend, and are therefore on these domains. Also, many more modern blogs are on .com domains because they use hosted blogging services such as www.blogger.com.

In addition, many UK political sites are hosted offshore in the belief that this provides some protection from UK courts.

Recently, as the Internet has grown and evolved, Google has adjusted the way it generates search results to prioritise “UK” sites over “International” sites for searches done in the UK. Among the factors used to identify UK sites are:

1. The site is hosted on a UK domain.
2. The site is hosted on a server located in the UK.

Ironically, Google aim to provide a good “local service”, but what can we do to keep old blogs in step with Google’s new approaches.

Tags: google uk blackhole, political blogging, 100 days to better blogging, best practice blogging, seo, search engine optimisation[tags]google uk blackhole, political blogging, 100 days to better blogging, best practice blogging, seo, search engine optimisation[/tags]

What can I do about it?

I suggest the following possible steps, but each blog needs to be aware of it’s own audience. Not all blogs may be able to take all these steps.

• Identify your audience, and tailor your blog specifically to that audience. Make sure that you own relevant domains in the countries where you have a large part of your audience.
• Consider moving your hosting where appropriate to a server hosted in the country (e.g., UK) of your main audience.
• Consider changing your main domain to the country where your main audience is located.
• Moving domains are problematic for blogs, as they are dependent on permalinks. So, develop a strategy to use multiple domain names, depending on where your audience are located. One example of such a strategy would be to host your main site on a country domain with a large audience, and to develop “feeder” sites that will give you a presence in other countries without duplicating content from your main site.

I will be covering how to move your blog, and the possible consequences, in a future article series with the “100 Days to Better Political Blogging” project.

Feedback and Discussion

Please discuss this article in the comments thread below - I will keep an eye on the thread to answer any questions.