msn.com or msn.co.uk ?

Hi all,

We run an air-conditioning company here in the UK and have recently had a pretty comprehensive site built.
We have optimised it (as far as timescales allow) and appear highly (No.1 for a while) on msn.com, but very poorly on msn.co.uk.

The site is visited regularly by msnbots (msnbot/0.3 (+http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm)).

Can anyone tell me why we are ranked much higher in msn.com and what we need to do to improve our ranking at msn.co.uk (where we ideally need to achieve better ranking).

Thanks in advance

Steve

The only few things that I'm aware of are:

1. Are you using a .co.uk domain name?

2. Is your website hosted on a server that is physically located in the UK?

It's my understanding that these issues may affect your uk search engine rankings.

Regards
Bluesuit

Our website is primarily a .com, but also appears at .co.uk (for the purpose of visitors guessing our site being at companyname.co.uk)

It is hosted from RedBus Interhouse, in the Docklands in London.

Given that we always use the .com domain, I am starting to realise why we are ranking so much higher in msn.com

Should we be submitting our website at both the .com and .co.uk domains, or will this cause confusion?
How could we register both URLS in a single directory (i.e. dmoz etc)?

Could we be penalised for duplicating our site content at what is in effect 2 different sites/URLS?

Thanks

Steve

Too be honest I would stick with what you are doing. Hosting a .com site and a .co.uk site with the same content could attract a penalty as you mention. As long as your hosting server is physically located in the UK (and its sounds like it probably is - though check with your provider) then you should be fine. Remember that MSN should soon be moving to their new search algo. Where are you ranking on the MSN Beta? There is also a special .co.uk MSN Beta to check. You may find like a number of others that your ranking in the beta version is significantly better than the current MSN.com listings.

I have the same exact problem!

On http://beta.search.msn.com/ my site www.commercio-elettronico.net is ranking #2 for "commercio elettronico" (italian for e-commerce) and I'm #1 on regionals Yahoo.it, Lycos.it, Altavista.it but on http://beta.search.msn.it/ wich is italina Beta MSN I'm not ranking.

This is a big problem Are those results tied to google results somehow? Since searching for "commercio elettronico" on http://beta.search.msn.it/ give EXACTLY the same results as searching for http://beta.search.msn.it/ on www.google.com

Thanks