Our approach to SEO at RevaHealth.com is never to attempt to deceive the search engines. We regard SEO as the art and science of narrowing the distance between the search engine’s understanding of our pages a human’s understanding of a page.

The search engine are trying to do a very hard job, they are trying to use machines to understand the nature and meaning of a page while simultaneously doing the same for users query’s. Even with the best brains on the planet the search engine’s understanding of a page is going to be different to the reality and it is our job to help it understand our pages given the tools that we have available.

There are thousands of ideas out there on how to influence the position of pages in Google index. Many of these are tricks designed to deceive the search engine and others are out-dated techniques that have long been relegated to the history books. The problem with all search engine optimization is that from research alone it is impossible to tell the snake oil form the Promised Land and some changes can have disastrous results.

We have found that every time we want to implement some changes, we first conduct a scientific experiment to check if it’s a good or bad idea. This takes time and dedication and is not something to be taken lightly. Note that despite every effort to remain scientific there is a good deal of interpretation at all stages as it is impossible to control all variables in the study because the search engines are effectively black boxes and no doubt look at variables that we have not considered.

One of the tools that the search engines use to interpret the intention of a page is the use of country specific domains. So pages that are targeted at an UK audience can benefit from a .co.uk domain. Google also allows you to manually assign a preferred country using its webmaster tools. The problem for us at RevaHealth.com is that while we have content that is focused towards specific countries, it is not just one country (99 in fact). This means that we can’t use Google web master tools for optimizing for particular countries.

We’re about to test now how redirect to www.RevaHealth.ie and www.RevaHealth.co.uk will influence our position in Google.ie and Google.co.uk. We have local domains registered but we used to redirect all traffic to our main domain www.RevaHealth.com. We will redirect pages of 10 counties in Ireland and 10 shires in the UK to the local domains. It’s a great number of pages when we multiply counties by hundreds of locations and 25 clinic types. We have to redirect the pages permanently (301), as temporary redirect (302) doesn’t pass the PR.

What can we achieve? We are expecting to see the surge in position of our Irish pages in Google.ie and UK pages in Google.co.uk as the domain-extension is suppose to influence it. We risk our position in Google.com but we expect that drop to be minor. We will dilute our traffic as well, as visitors will be divided between domains. We will keep you informed on how we’re doing with the experiment.