I was out at a networking meeting last week and someone mentioned to me that WHERE you host your website has a direct affect on a website’s Search Engined Ranking.(Or one factor in SEO/search engine optimization.)
At first I was thinking, sure that makes sense, but as the conversation went further the details just didn’t seem right. There was talk of moving from California to Settle and seeing dramatic effects in rankings just because of where the data is being served up from….hmmm
Below is Oregon Publishing’s view on what sever location affects.
- Location Finding the right server location should be the first SEO (Search Engine Optimization) task that you do,
Yes, but think country based, not state or county. - Domain extension.
Knowing where your website is hosted combined with your domain name suffix/extension (.com, .co.uk, com.au etc.,) will determine which geographical version of Google will give you the best results. If you didn’t know Google has county specific website like google.com.au or google.co.uk. *Important* If you use a generic name suffix such as .com, .org or any domain that is not country specific, Google and the other search engines will determine the location of your website’s business using other on site factors such as telephone and address. - Geo-Targeted.
If your business is based in the UK and your host is located in the US, your business will be affected. Most of your searchers will actually be using Google.co.uk instead of Google.com so you should do your best to target them. - Load speed of your website.
A US based server hosting visitors from another country will take longer to load then it would hosting to a user own country. That makes sense, the data has to travel across the world’s datacenters to get develiered.
The quote below is from Google Webmaster Central Post from 2010 (it should be noted over time Google has further decreased relying on server location)
Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.es/2010/03/working-with-multi-regional-websites.html What matters MORE in SEO
- Get Inbound local links
- Use the correct TLD (country code: in USA – .com, UK – .co.uk, AU – .com.au etc.)
- Use Google Webmaster Tools to verify your Locale (if you don’t own the TLD)
- Do local keyword research and target the best results
- Don’t interlink too heavily
- Host at an IP inside the country you’re targeting
- Website architecture (easily crawled by the right bots and spiders)
- Social media Factors Tweets, Likes, Pins, G+, etc.
- A pages title tag is considered one of most important factor (not just for bots, but what STICKS OUT To Humans as they scan the search results)
- Keywords in the domain name
- Remove canonicalization, or simple don’t split your page rank between www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com (pick one and redirect the other to it)
Your Questions and comments about server location and SEO welcomed!