Monday, June 19, 2006

Local Search, Mini Sites And Broken Images

I've been learning a bit about location issues to do with web hosting and site domains, regarding local searches. I've been frustrated for a while that searching for simple terms in google.com turn this blog up well. However, despite the fact this blog is a lot about Wales and the UK, it doesn't turn up in the UK only pages search at google.co.uk.

It comes down to the hosting of this site in the US, where hosting is a lot cheaper and feature packed than the UK. If this was a co.uk site, it would show up in the UK only search thanks to the co.uk domain. If this site was a .com, but physically hosted in the UK, then it would show in the UK only search also. As it's a .com, hosted in the US, it doesn't show at all in the local UK only search.

This problem affects a number of my sites, thanks to my initially setting them up on .com domains. So, I realised that I was missing a lot of search traffic with Crazy Frog Fans.com - a strong UK topic. I wanted to try and capture this traffic and keep the big .com site hosted in the US. I picked up Crazy Frog Fans Co Uk and put a mini-site there which scrapes a lot of content from the .com site, as well as having it's own unique content.

This Co.UK site now shows up in the UK only Google search - but notice, the Dot Com still doesn't. It's already showing UK only search traffic, whom will either get what it needs there, or move on to the richer content at the .com site.

I have a few domains that I need to do a similar thing too, because as it stands, comparative UK hosting just is not anywhere near as good or cost effective.

The Crazy Frog Fans UK site is also of note as it's another ground up CSS only design from myself (yes it's very simple - that's the intention though!) Continuing my growing love of CSS and getting to grips with it, I fiddled the Crazy Frog Fans UK template to make two mini online bingo themed sites - one a portal for the UK style 90 ball online bingo and the other for the US style 75 ball online bingo. Both scrape content from a couple of my sources to make new sites with a narrower and more online focused scope than my Playing Bingo site. It will be interesting to see how they perform.

In other news, if you've looked at the archive pages here, you'll notice that a lot of images from 2004 and 2005 are broken. This is down to inconsistent linking practices from my self. I'm working on a fix, as I hope to shortly move this domain to a UK server, to get that UK only traffic that might be interested in this site and not have to lose one of my older domains. It's all fun and games... :)

Posted by Dio Bach at 15:52

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