What might cause SERPs differ from country to country ?

[thilini]

Hi all,

I am having a major issue regarding organic search rankings at the moment. I am based in Sri Lanka ( google.lk ) . My question is why doesn't my website show up on search results pages on google.lk when its already ranked within first 5 slots on 1st page on almost every other local search engines ( such as google.com, google,dk, google.co.uk ).

What would be the reason for such a issue . ?

[Danapollo]

Hi Osanda,

Just from the information you have provided, it could be down to a few things (only speculating, though!).

It may be that the search terms just aren't that popular in Sri Lanka, but are more so in other places.

Have you tried hosting your website on servers elsewhere to see if this impacts your results? I'm no expert on this, as it's not my field - but I'm just suggesting a few things.

Finally - is your traffic low? or are you happy with it? If you're happy with it, don't worry! It may be the case that more people may opt to use the .com version of Google or the .co.uk version if they can do - it's all down to their preferences.

Hope this provokes some thought/leads to an answer for you!

[SEO-Doctor]

Create a dedicated sub folder for Sri Lanka /lk   and geo target it to the country in Webmaster tools.

[thilini]

Dear Gareth,

What you are telling isnt practical . There will be few issues when we make a dedicated sub folder and geo target it.

1 - Duplicate content

2 - you cant geo target a specific sub folder through webmaster tools

[gfiorelli1]

Hi Osanda,

Gareth is right and you, sorry to tell it, are wrong.

1. You can geo target specific sub folders on Google Webmaster Tools, as it can be done for generic domain names (.com, .net...) and subdomains (sk.domain.com...)
2. In order to avoid duplicate content, you can use the rel alternate hreflang tag or in the header section of the pages of your site or directly in the sitemap xml. In case of exact duplicates, then, you can also use the rel=canonical in order to say to Google what of the exact duplicated pages it should present in the index.

Said that, in order to geotarget a site, you should also think about getting links from the targeted country. If you are received a lot of links from not Sri Lanka sites, then other local sites (maybe with country level domain name) will rank better than you because they have important links from other local sites.