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Are your customers only coming from the particular city where your data center is?  From what I understand, people will sometimes ship servers to a colocation facility outside of their own area - to take advantage of better bandwidth costs / peering, etc. In terms of link building, I would probably go after two types of links: 1.  geo links related to your particular city - so, if you're in Dallas, maybe try to get links from other tech related companies in Dallas 2.  hosting and colocation links - There should be lots of general information websites related to hosting online.  Since those links would be relevant to your business, they should definitely benefit you in trying to rank for colocation and hosting related keywords, even if they are coming from a .co.uk domain, or are on a website listing an international address. If you have several colocation facilities where you do provide hosting services, I would optimize for each of those locations, since a certain group of customers would like to have local access to their data center.

Hi - I can't say I know 'exactly' what's happening here, but there's something strange about how your A records are setup for your DNS.  For the sites I host, I have a single A record for the www. and another for the non-www for the domain, and they both are assigned to the same ip address.  When I view the A records for your sites, they have a variety of different A records set. ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.ecostore.co.nz.            IN      A ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.ecostore.co.nz.     600     IN      A       174.129.212.2 www.ecostore.co.nz.     600     IN      A       75.101.145.87 www.ecostore.co.nz.     600     IN      A       75.101.163.44 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;www.ecostoreaustralia.com.au.  IN      A ;; ANSWER SECTION: www.ecostoreaustralia.com.au. 3388 IN   A       75.101.145.87 www.ecostoreaustralia.com.au. 3388 IN   A       75.101.163.44 The non-www's seem kind of random as well.  I'd talk with your hosting provider and see if they can help you clear this up.

I really think the biggest factor is whether all the content is going to be exactly the same but translated in dif. languages or you are creating a product or service that spans 10 different countries. For example; if you are creating a site about how to stop smoking or about the same products and you translate that to 10 different languages then I suggest using Ryan's approach. If however you are creating something country specific, like a directory for businesses in each specific country then I would simply run with 10 domains (if you're lucky enough to find the same name with each ccTLD for the countries you're targeting) I'm guessing that if you are willing to make the effort to redo the content in so many languages then the financial payout should warrant spending the money to buy 10 domains + hosting etc. If you specified the topic of your site someone who's already done it might offer better advice, hope this helps

thanks for confirming it is caused by webmaster tools. I may give it a try to change server location via proxy instead of using geo setting in webmaster tools.

1 to 2 months ouch... Thanks for your help... No idea how it was set I will assume mistake... Justin

Hi Mike, I do think that there is going to be an even more local bias in search results; and we will see a lot more of the phenomenon that you describe above ie.a site going up in local/ country-specific results while going down in international results.  While it will not be impossible to rank highly globally, it has and will continue to become a lot more challenging to do so, especially for terms that are quite competitive. To market better internationally - or specific geographic markets, you may need to give those geo signals to Google, which could be having country-targeted pages on the site; geo-targeted sub-domains/ sub-folders or even separate websites targeted at a market that you are targeting. Regarding the second issue, if I understand you correctly,having keywords in the url isn't bad/ black hat-- it is perfectly legitimate and  recommended (though not necessarily a must-have). So, if it doesn't involve a whole lot of re-development and you feel that is making a huge difference in the space you are operating, then you should go for it. Hope this helps. Best, Manoj

@ Ryan, thank you for your detailed answer!

The .com really shouldn't cause you any issues in the future either - I really wouldn't worry about it You're more than welcome - totally understand how confusing this stuff can be! Hannah

Hi Jason, I use the GeoSurf toolbar to get connected with proxies all over the world. They have 90+ geolocations available. Whenever I want to check my rankings in e.g. Germany, I just click on the German flag and then go to google.de. Now I get real German search results for my keywords. http://www.geosurf.com/ I think you still get a 5 day trial when signing up.

Let me be the odd one out, you may loose your ranking on google.co.uk and gain positive effect on google.com.au {Keeping in mind everything remains constant except the hosting and ip address}

Do you think the english homepage will have more seo power if it goes directly tohttp://www.website.com/ In short, yes. When you redirect any URL you will lose between 1-10% of the link juice from your backlinks. That does not sound like much but since it does affect every link it's something to consider. Are the overwhelming majority of your visitors English readers? If so, having the site default to the English version makes sense. Depending on the nature of your site, you may wish to offer pages for the various types of English such as EN-UK, EN-US, etc.

All my sites are in multiple languages - including french - and I have seen much better results when I translated the file names into French instead of leaving them in English.  So for example I have found that: www.mywebsite.com/bonjour.html performed better for relevant French language searches than www.mywebsite.com/goodmorning.html This has held true for me in all the languages.  Even in Chinese and Russian, I write them out with latin characters and it seems to make a difference. I hope this helps.

John, Thanks for adding all of these great suggestions - I don't do international that often so the full list of methods isn't always in my conscious awareness!

Just to let you know I am German by birth and I moved to United States a young age however return their quit frequently. to get your point though if you use a content delivery network such as Akamai, limelight, Max CDN, go to http://builtwith.com you will see plenty of fantastic content delivery networks http://trends.builtwith.com/cdns to be honest I would recommend price wise Max CDN is very competitive. A company like high wind specializes in having your server wherever you want it and still getting that perfect time  plus location information geo-tagged where you need it so your network runs perfectly. Here's their link. http://www.highwinds.com/network/index.php I will say this and I may be a little biased however German companies tend to doing extremely thorough job. I am proud to say I think SEOmoz has done that type of job here. I hope this is of some help, Sincerely, Thomas Zickell

Why wouldn't you submit to multiple high ranking content directories sites? If a few pick you up great.... Are you worried of a dupe content penalty? Are you using C tags to avoid this?

All good - hope it works out well for you

I have done quite a bit of work on this recently, although most of the advice has been not to react and don't do anything. At the very least you need to know what cookies are being used on your site and inform users of their purpose. I would start by reading. http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/privacy_and_electronic_communications/the_guide/cookies.aspx