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Sounds like Clive is having a Friday moan

So the Bing Business Portal has been released, and is now available for UK and USA based businesses (not sure about other countries).

This replaces the older Bing Local Listing Center, which never made it to the UK.

It's free, and basically Bings version of Google Places, so it's well worth signing up.

Not the most user friendly interface, and is pretty longwinded, plus you need to verify at the end, and it wouldn't recognise our telephone number! So I've opted for a snail mail verification.

You need a A Microsoft Live ID, so will be prompted to create one, and probarbly a good thing to create one just for business use. Make sure you untick all the marketing options

Here's the link:
Bing Business Portal (BETA)

blimey! Never heard of this either, hmmm shall need to try and track down some travel details! Worth a punt

Ok, don't want to confuse you, or go back on what i said, but as you are a .com, then me personally, I would consider getting a .co.uk specific domain if your target audience is only going to be UK.

The reason I say this, is although Google webmaster tools will let you specify location quite happily, other search engines and indexing sites may not have this facility and will assume you are US based. So although Googles god now, if Facebook for example took over the world, then things could change.

So for non Google engines, then domain extension and IP location can and will have a contributing factor.

But if you have a .co.uk (or any country specific) then you can host on the dark side of the moon, IP location will never be an issue. Only serious things to consider are reliability and (as in our case) transaction times.

Isn't Kip from Leicester? Explains a lot

Honestly, that's the biggest load of old cobblers, and yet you hear loads of so called SEO professionals beating their drum over this over a zillion forum threads... spreading confusion and scaremongering.

If you have a country specific domain, eg .co.uk .fr .nz etc, then you can host anywhere from the Isle of Sheppy to Zimbabwe or Iceland and Google couldn't give 2 hoots. Because it will automatically take your TLD (top level domain) location, and assume that your widget.fr website is only relevant to Johhny Frenchman. It couldn't care less where the IP originated from.

Unless.... you are using a non country specific, like .com .net etc, in which case it will factor in your IP location. But you can over ride that in webmaster tools and tell google your content is only for people in Clapton.

I've had flaming wars over this topic on various forums and people get quite emotive but lose sight of reality.

Best example I use is IBM's site. They have a country portal for just about every country in the world. Can you imagine them hosting a web server in every country

I'd happily keep our servers in the US, and we have no problems with indexing or traffic. But I am starting to get concerned over transaction times, which is a geographical reality. Data packets take longer to get to your machine from America than they do from London, and Google is now hotting up on site speed as an algorithm signal.

So I've decided to prove to all the doubting thomas's once and for all by setting up a UK server, and geographically loadbalancing it with the US, until I'm happy the UK is reliable. If we suddenly get even more indexing and traffic, I'll happily be proved wrong, but I very much doubt we'll see any difference other than a faster response time.

lol honestly I'm looking but not seeing!! Maybe the RSC has one somewhere

lol, something you are trying to tell us?

Well I suppose the MG name lives on...

BBC News - MG cars roll off Longbridge production line

...at least it isn't an MG Metro!

Worrying piece from the Beeb:
BBC News - Rise in UK companies facing major financial difficulty

I can see bars and restaurants suffering, but the feedback from small businesses seems to be more positive?