Less UK country flags in Webalizer since moving to HTTPS? Anyone Else?

[niche]

Hi I dont know if anyone has any experience here, but since I changed my site to https, my visitors have gone up by at least a third but most of the visitors to the site are now from everywhere except UK. At 8am this morning I had hardly any UK country flags in my BP stats but loads from usa and elsewhere where before I would have had a good amount from uk. I do have webmasters set up correctly ie not specifying a country as I do take orders from other countries apart from the UK but the UK is my main market. UK country flags in BP webalizer stats are very few but loads from elsewhere. Has anybody else noticed this in the Webalizer stats on BP especially since changing to https?

Would be very interested from those who have changed to https or anyone else?

thanks
Kim

[Gillf]

There has been some discussion in the seo world about multi national traffic increase being something to do with Google and so if they are right it is nothing to do with your change to https. https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...lts-22135.html

[niche]

Thats very interesting Gill, thanks for that - at least its reassuring that Im not alone, not sure what I should do though, unless it will correct itself automatically, although in the meantime, it will no doubt push up my bounce rate.

Kim

[Gillf]

I don't think there is much anyone can do.... its up to Google to sort what ever they have done that is causing this wrongly targeted traffic. Although if you haven't already done so you can set your target country in Google Webmaster Tools which might if not already set might do something to mitigate the results of Google issue.

[niche]

Ok well let's hope they sort it soon. Thanks for your thoughts.

Kim

[jhpe07]

If you look at your orders you will probably find UK orders with international flags, in the past I asked a few customers why this was, and a lot of customers who use work computers route from different countries for some reason.

VPN browsing is also becoming more and more popular for some unknown reason.

[niche]

If you look at your orders you will probably find UK orders with international flags, in the past I asked a few customers why this was, and a lot of customers who use work computers route from different countries for some reason.

VPN browsing is also becoming more and more popular for some unknown reason.

Yes I occasionally see that with an order. The situation described above has happened overnight with an almost double increase in visitors but mostly non uk.

Thanks.
Kim

[bornfree]

This thread is interesting and I wonder if somebody with knowledge of SEO/Google could help with something? Most of our sales are from UK customers, but we want to increase sales from overseas. We would like it if somebody in say the USA, Germany, etc. is searching on Google, our site comes up. In Webmaster Tools (in the 'international targeting' section) it says our domain is currently associated with the target UK (presumably because ours is a .co.uk domain). Is this the best setting to achieve what we want, i.e. searches from anywhere in the world will show our site? It does say in Webmaster Tools that you can choose 'unlisted' if you don't want your site associated with any location. I wouldn't want to lose the traffic from UK searches though.
Any advice much appreciated for a beginner!

Travel & Tourism Publishing

[niche]

This thread is interesting and I wonder if somebody with knowledge of SEO/Google could help with something? Most of our sales are from UK customers, but we want to increase sales from overseas. We would like it if somebody in say the USA, Germany, etc. is searching on Google, our site comes up. In Webmaster Tools (in the 'international targeting' section) it says our domain is currently associated with the target UK (presumably because ours is a .co.uk domain). Is this the best setting to achieve what we want, i.e. searches from anywhere in the world will show our site? It does say in Webmaster Tools that you can choose 'unlisted' if you don't want your site associated with any location. I wouldn't want to lose the traffic from UK searches though.
Any advice much appreciated for a beginner!

Travel & Tourism Publishing

After some research I decide "unlisted" was best which is what mine is set to (we are .com). I think any changes made to this setting can take Google months to process (from what I read online). Like you say if you are already set to uk you want to be sure nothing detrimental will happen. Can you actually change it with a .co.uk website though, I thought I had read somewhere that you can't but I could be completely wrong. I'm also not experienced with these things so it's good you have asked the question bornfree. I noticed this sudden jump after I added the https site to webmasters although it must have been a coincidence.

[bornfree]

After some research I decide "unlisted" was best which is what mine is set to (we are .com). I think any changes made to this setting can take Google months to process (from what I read online). Like you say if you are already set to uk you want to be sure nothing detrimental will happen. Can you actually change it with a .co.uk website though, I thought I had read somewhere that you can't but I could be completely wrong. I'm also not experienced with these things so it's good you have asked the question bornfree. I noticed this sudden jump after I added the https site to webmasters although it must have been a coincidence.

Thanks Niche. I think you may be correct about changing a .co.uk website to 'unlisted'. I can't see a way to do this in GWT. We also own the .com version of the domain (which is set to automatically send people to the .co.uk one). I have today set the .com one to 'unlisted'. Maybe a user in the US or somewhere else other than the UK will get the .com version when they do a search? Bit confusing (but interesting!).

Travel & Tourism Publishing