Forum Moderators: open
Get this:
- .com domain
- hosted in US
- Has a <meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-US" /> tag in the head that should, in theory, tell the SE's that it's using American English
- Has around 200+ backlinks and a PR3
BUT
- It is for a business in the Arab Emirates and has many English pages, but also French, Russian and Arabic pages all divided into separate subfolders.
- Google.ae sees the site riding high searching for English terms but is not anywhere for Google.com, not Msn or Yahoo.
- The competition on Google.com who are riding high have lower PR, less incoming link, less site content. I'm puzzled!
Can any one shed any light?
Thanks
you can use google webmaster tools to set geographic target for your site.
I'll add my welcome: Welcome. :)
It's possible for a .com site hosted in the U.S. to be regarded by the SE's as primarily relevant to other geo's, and in some cases I've seen SE's and especially G "choosing" which country to feature the site in, to the detriment of rankings in other countries.
Not long ago I saw a site with multiple versions (both English language, different country TLD's), each using on-page geo terms to target their markets. But the CoutryA site wasn't ranking in its market. Turned out the CountryB site was seen as more pertinent to the CountryA geo (so CountryA site was MIA), but the CountryB site carried none of CountryA's geo terms, so ranked in CountryA, but only for some non-geo generic terms.
So, what is it about your site that causes the SE's to think you have more to do with the AE than with other countries ... and what might you do to address the issue(s) and make things easier for the SE's to understand?
I can think of a lot of things that might be confusing the SE's, and/or, not providing them with enough information. ;-)
