BTW subscribe to comments plugin for WP is great. ;o)

Was the original a .co.uk name?

I came up against this problem before a few years back, with alot of users in the south using ESAT as there homepage.

The programmers had defaulted the google box on esat’s homepage to Google.ie, meaning a large chunk of ROI traffic was getting pushed towards Google’s i.e. domain – that in combination with Google geo-targetting meant that we were missing some traffic opportunities in the south. With this being a big market for the company (based in the North) – we had to come up with some solution.

My advice would be to register a .ie and chase different keywords, putting different content on it. For the client in question we linked heavily between the two domains, and ran quirky linkbaity (competitions etc) on the IE, to try and gain traction faster. Google Webmaster tools allows you to target each market for each domain, but this is something I personally feel Google needs to address. We achieved moderate success with this approach, and started to rank for phrases more on the .IE – works particularly well for geographic related phrases. Which you’ve mentioned.

“Furniture in Monaghan” for example.

Geo targetting from a user perspective should be optional, and the results set is the same unless you specify you want it to be GEO specific. It would mean sending someone a link to a Google result would be universally the same. Throw google’s approach to personal results, and there’s another spanner in the works.

I can see what they are doing, but I don’t necessarily agree with it.