Or watch out UK SEO here we come…

Back in March we flipped the GEO switch to Spain inside Webmaster Tools mainly out of curiosity really, as we have no Spanish content as yet (not long now, promise) but really just to see how it affected rankings.

The site is hosted in the US and was always at it’s strongest in US searches, breaching inside the top 20 for SEO this last few weeks on the gl=us string, and considering it’s set to Spain, SERPs here have always been fairly erratic, and much more predictable (if there is any such thing) in straight Google.com searches.

And the UK is a funny one currently, some terms rank side-by-side with their counterpart in the US, more or less tracking the .com results, maybe +/- 1 position or so, some are even slightly better in the UK, and yet other terms are easy top 10′s on Google.com but totally off the radar on Google.co.uk

So now, more as an experiment than anything else we’ve reset the controls inside WMT to “UK” and will watch changes to GEO weighting closely over the coming months.

Physical hosting location of the site is still far and away the most important factor when it comes to GEO targeted rankings, and US / UK are almost entirely different indexes at times, with only rare (usually really strong sites) showing in both.

We have done this 18 months ago, (moved hosts, not WMT settings) but are curious with today’s Google what’s changed if anything, – just how effective the switch is, how much one area has to suffer, and how much benefit there is to be had on the new target index.

and with various clients considering moves,  we need to test it again ourselves on the sacrificial alter, seoibiza.com

- poor site takes some proper stick in the name of research, it must be said.

Keep you informed as always..

btw, the sitelinks also started showing again today on both Google.co.uk and Google.com for “SEO in Ibiza”  ..now whether Google means to say we are the authority on that subject or not..

..we damn well are..