As Google tries to make its search results more relevant, we’re seeing how content, TLD (eg .com, .co.uk etc) and host location are interacting to influence natural search results.

I’m not going to give any secrets away about our clients, but we’ve seen unexpected results for a number of sites and for this blog.

Let’s concentrate on Dangerous Thinking, because I’m happy to discuss what’s happening here. I live and work in the UK, but back when dinosaurs roamed the blogosphere, I registered dangerous-thinking.com, thinking that was more desirable than dangerous-thinking.co.uk.

This blog is hosted at A Small Orange in the States, as they came very highly recommended as a host for WordPress-based blogs. I have no arguments against ASO; how they can supply such excellent support for such a small hosting fee, I’ll never know.

But Google now looks at the .com and hosting arrangements and feels that the content here is relevant to a US-based audience, and will tend to list it on Google.com, rather than Google.co.uk.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I welcome US readers – in fact, anyone, from anywhere – here, but this blog has the ultimate purpose of attracting business to myself and Web Positioning Centre, and even our clients based abroad all have links to the UK. So I want this blog to rank well on Google.co.uk, as the UK is where our business comes from.

Now, as you may have seen on a previous post, I discovered that it is the top UK blog for ‘SEO Copywriting’, so things are obviously not as straightforward as I outlined above.

Let’s get the easy bit out of the way. The reason that this blog shows up on Google.co.uk searches is that it has a lot of content from the past that talks about where I live and the area we do business in – there are a huge number of references to Sussex, as well as some to London.

I dug a bit deeper by running a report on a whole bundle of key phrases to see how Dangerous Thinking performs on Google.com, Google.co.uk (Web) and Google.co.uk (UK). While it performs adequately on Google.com, its performance on Google.co.uk was a surprise. It performs very well on ‘Web’, but does not feature in the top 50 places on ‘UK’.

I conclude that the .com domain and US hosting is ruling it out of the most focused UK searches. I’ve run two tests now, some weeks apart, with the same result. So I’m planning to move Dangerous Thinking back to the UK. I hope that I don’t lose my US traffic, but the scientist in me wants to see what happens anyway.

I wonder who can recommend a reliable, reasonably-priced UK hosting outfit that runs cPanel? I want to transfer the blog in one easy hit.

Edit, 25 September 2007: My colleague, Paul Silver just made a very valid point. There are rather a lot of Dangerous Thinkings in bold in this piece. Now, for me, that’s just house style – I use bolds much as a traditional print publication would use italics, to highlight names and titles. The search engines might just think I was trying to spam them. So I’ve taken 50% or so of the DTs out.

We always advise our clients that reciprocal linking (“I’ll link to you, if you link to me”) is a waste of effort. Yet earlier today a friend of mine challenged that point of view by saying that Google explicitly contradicts our advice.

Off to Google to see what they say about linking these days. I found this page on Linking Schemes. Here’s the meat of what Google says you shouldn’t do:

…some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

Links intended to manipulate PageRank

Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web

Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)

Buying or selling links

I think that’s pretty clear – by stressing excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging, Google is ruling out you basing your link campaign on link exchange or plugging into link farms or other kind of mass reciprocal link generating scheme.

And on what you should do, Google has this advice:

Before making any single decision, you should ask yourself the question: Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

It is not only the number of links you have pointing to your site that matters, but also the quality and relevance of those links. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the buzzing blogger community can be an excellent place to generate interest. In addition, submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

The key sentence, in my opinion, is Is this going to be beneficial for my page’s visitors?

Web Positioning Centre’s Paul Silver – our linking guru – has always been against buying links. Indeed, I can’t think of an occasion when we’ve done that for a client.

Recently, Google’s Matt Cutts has commented at length on paid-for links, and there has been much debate in the blogosphere.

If you want a more concise statement on Google’s view, there’s a great paragraph from Vanessa Fox on the Google Webmaster Central Blog:

Links are an important signal in our PageRank calculations, as they tend to indicate when someone has found a page useful. Links that are purchased are great for advertising and traffic purposes, but aren’t useful for PageRank calculations. Buying or selling links to manipulate results and deceive search engines violates our guidelines. (my italics)

I think that’s clear enough – if you’re interested in natural search engine results, don’t buy links.