We started hosting services with a dedicated server on .com domain. We want to provide our services in UK as well and for that we purchased .co.uk domain. But, creating a new website and purchasing a different server is not feasible at the moment. We want to use same server for some of our UK customers. I heard that using IP method is not SEO friendly, it detects IP of specific country and redirects the visitor to that country page.
What will be the best way to use similar website on .co.uk domain with same server? We just want to show prices in local currency. We don’t want to harm seo at all because we are new in business and willing to grow in rankings.
If you’re going to just change prices but keep the content the same you would likely have problems with duplicate content. The normal practice is to use subdomains (i.e. us.yoursite.com and uk.yoursite.com) and use rel=“canonical” to avoid the penalty. I don’t know if it would work for completely different domains though but you can try. Here’s a link about rel=“canonical”.
IP location does matter, but its not the only ranking factor.
You have a country specific domain… Along with that set your target location in webmaster tools. With this, your server location won’t effect much on your rankings and traffic.
We just added country selection option just like fatcow.com and we will also show different content when someone select any country other than US. I hope this will be fine. Please guide us little more.