Why am I ranking in the top 10 in yahoo.com but not in yahoo.jp

[Prodigy]

For all you SEO buffs out there, I was wondering if you could lend a noob a little help.

My Japanese developed sites are all ranking in the top 10 in yahoo.com but not even on the radar in yahoo.jp except for 荷物.jp

I thought developing the sites below would give me some leverage, but am I doing something wrong with my coding? Should I be using utf instead of shift?

分析.jp
ダイアリー.jp
荷物.jp
ペン.jp
ゼリー.jp
カシミア.jp
卒業.jp

Would appreciate any and all help. I'm trying to learn more about SEO but this is a first for me! Thanks in advance!

[markits]

Very interesting. Wonder if anyone here can give some insights.

[alexd]

I remember reading somewhere before that local search engines, ie: yahoo.co.jp rank sites differently compared to yahoo.com depending in which country the site is hosted.

I think that the IP of the site plays some role in the results of localised search engines. I have noticed this happening with some of my sites within Google.

I read on Google somewhere, though I think it related to google.co.uk, that they said that in order to improve your positions, your site should actually be hosted in the UK.

What makes this a pain in the a** for me is that if I want to develop some of my IDNs, the fact that they will most likely be hosted in either the US or UK will most likely play a significant role in how these sites perform in the main localised search portals for those countries.

Something I am planning to look into in the next couple of months or so, is to look into hosting packages that are based within specific countries. I dont need that much space, so I want to get some idea of the basic prices for hosting packages across the globe. I think this may be of help with regards to the local search engines of those countries.

I'll let you know what I find out as soon as I have researched this option further.


Alex

[rhys]

Yes, this is what happens when you encode in Shift JIS not UTF-8

[Prodigy]

Yes, this is what happens when you encode in Shift JIS not UTF-8



Thanks for all of your replies.

RHYS:

I am changing all of the meta tag codes right now. Would you mind explaining why utf-8 helps with the SEO at yahoo.co.jp?

[gammascalper]

I thought SEs used the charset as a hint as to what the main language on the page is, and since UTF-8 encapsulates the unicode standard and could be any number of languages, I thought Shift_JIS would've provided a more specific 'hint' that the site is Japanese.

Alexd: I don't think where you are hosted matters as much as how quickly your pages resolve in Japan. I had an ASCII site that ranked in the top page for a 50k ovt term, but when I recoded the site with an affiliate that took for ever to render their bits, my rank plummeted. The spiders timed-out and moved-on to the next site or something.

[rhys]

I'm not sure that anyone knows why that is for Yahoo, but that it seems to be the case. Olney was the first to mention this phenomenon to me, perhaps he knows the answer.

[Olney]

I found out a long time ago if your site is UTF-8 all search engines will index it. If it's in shift-JIS it will only appear in Japanese Search Engines. That's not the main issue, it's backlinking. If our site is UTF-8 & gets backlinks from other encodes it seems to actually count.

My suggestions would be

First page make sure you have at least 500文字 or more
Put a few more words in your title
Put a few more words in your description (plus the keyword)

ALSO
This is a biggie I discovered this year

If you are doing adsense DO NOT NAME YOUR URLS IN ENGLISH

I added more pages to my Diamond.jp

a page called diamondring.html
a page called engagement ring

Except for that there wasn't any English within the pages
When I looked at Adsense from here
The companies targeted English users were paying more for "Diamond Ring"
& since it was in the URL it was producing a bunch of English ads

Also try to trade links on Japanese sites (Even our IDN sites)
Try to make it related if possible.

It might also take a month after it's indexed

Put in Google Analytics
You might be ranking for other keywords

My ブラックジャック.jp ranks well for "Black"
I'm curious to know what I will rank for Black with "ブラック.jp"

Also having a blog or another site that you backlink to your IDNs from helps.

Ad Adsense channels to see which ad space gets the most clicks

I used to have 2 ad boxes
One on the side & 1 on the top
People only Clicked the ones at top

Google only displays the top paying ads or the top converting ads
So less actually makes you more

I have to do a bit more but with only with 6 or 8 sites (That are optimized for Adsense)
I'm hitting double digit days everyday guranteed
They are not all high paying keywords though.
Next month I'll be buying content to develop 7 Real Estate domains (Way higher paying keywords)
I'll be using the exact Same format that worked for me.

Find what works for you & duplicate it.
Starting off with lower competitive keywords is good you can see results faster.

[gammascalper]

Alot of info to digest -- thanks.

-- "If our site is UTF-8 & gets backlinks from other encodes it seems to actually count."

Do you mean links to English US sites that have nothing to do with the linked-to site's subject matter count positively?

-- "If you are doing adsense DO NOT NAME YOUR URLS IN ENGLISH"

I found that yahoo.co.jp cannot handle folder names in unicode. It turns them into HTML entities, which create super-long gibberish looking URLs.

Can you give an example of this?

btw, this morning, my first unicode site created was ranked #23 on yahoo.co.jp, after about 6 months of not ranking for a competitive 70k term. It received about 50 visitors, which is groovy for 3rd page. :-D

It's in charset utf-8 too, and only a one-pager, but a dense one-pager.

[blastfromthepast]

It is important to send the LANGUAGE code either in the HTML header or in a meta tag.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="jp">

If you are sending text with no content-language code, spiders have to take extra time to figure out what language the page is in, and may get confused.

Is it a Chinese page with some quotes of Japanese text? Or is it a real Japanese page? These kinds of decisions get made easily by humans, but confuse bots.

To avoid English directory titles, try numbers. Yes, unicode directory and file names are best, but both Yahoo and Google croak on anything of any decent length.


 

[thegenius1]

It is important to send the LANGUAGE code either in the HTML header or in a meta tag.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="jp">

If you are sending text with no content-language code, spiders have to take extra time to figure out what language the page is in, and may get confused.

Is it a Chinese page with some quotes of Japanese text? Or is it a real Japanese page? These kinds of decisions get made easily by humans, but confuse bots.

To avoid English directory titles, try numbers. Yes, unicode directory and file names are best, but both Yahoo and Google croak on anything of any decent length.




Right On