.org.uk and MSN

Mike from Efikim asks:

In your blog entry you say MSN will only include .co.uk sites, or sites verifiably sited in the UK (and imply that google does the same). Surely they’ll also list .org.uk sites (I look after one!)

The quick answer is yes!

The site that you are asking about,  http://www.lowermosswood.org.uk, is hosted in the UK anyway, so it’s verifiable as a UK site on two counts, so MSN and Google will allow it into the UK searches in their indexes.

In my article on the 9th of August I mentioned .co.uk as compared to  .com, .net, .org, .info etc. sites and failed to mention other sites with a UK in their TLD.

I don’t look after a .org.uk myself, but one of my sites is a .ltd.uk. And it fires on both the web results and the UK search results for most of it’s terms, including "heating":

http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=heating&FORM=QBRE

http://search.msn.co.uk/results.aspx?q=heating&FORM=QBRE&rf=1

(Two months after writing this article, the site owner thought he had learned enough about search engine optimisation from us and decided to start tweaking the site, adding content, changing the code, altering the page title and description, etc, so, as you have probably guessed, he’s dropped from the top 100 in MSN for his terms, as well as the other engines. Shame really.)

It’s true to say that it is hosted in the UK as well and I would always advise UK hosting for any site if your main market is the UK, but there are plenty of examples of .org.uk sites that are hosted outside the UK that feature in the MSN UK searches. www.norway.org.uk being one of them. www.norway.com, however, is ranked second on the world search, but ranks nowhere on the UK searches, as it is not hosted in the UK.

 

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