Physical Location Of Server & Search Results

[chandrika]

Does the physical location of where a sites server is have any effect on where Google etc may prefer to show your results. If a site that got alot of US traffic, was moved from a US server to a server physically located in the UK, is it a possibility that some of the US traffic could be lost?

Or is the only location based results served by the SE, based around the domain extension such as .co.uk .com etc?

[Webnauts]

We moved already our site form Germany to a server in the U.S and in a very short time our rankings and traffic in the U.S improved dramatically.
We experienced some loss in the German local results though. But we were not concerned about that.

If someone disagrees with me here, I am not willing to go into a debate about this, as this is my experience, and it is a fact.

One factor is that local results are based around the domain extension.

Another factor is the origin countries of your IBLs.

[chandrika]

Thankyou Webnauts, I remember from along time back reading that it mattered, but my host provider is pushing me towards a UK server and telling me it makes no difference, but I am sure I read that it did and it would make sense that it did, and as you have experienced this first hand, well it just goes to show.

[billmarshall]

You should always host in the same country that is your principle market. If that is the US then host in the US. Remember that a .com address contains no geographical information so with Google and MSN they look at the hosting country next.

The worst cases are non US countries using .com addresses and hosting in a different country to their own - a UK-based .com which is hosted in Germany will get virtually no rankings in the UK-only results on Google and MSN (Yahoo has other methods and seems to be able to identify the target market rather better).

I've no direct experience of the reverse situation but I would certainly expect that Google would start to assume you were a UK facing company and you might suffer some drops in the US listings.

By coincidence I just blogged on this topic the other day
Importance of good hosting for search results

[kgun]

The best solution is perhaps to use both a dot.com and .co.uk domain where the first is hosted in the USA and the second in UK.

Related WPW threads:

Google UK results diverge

Does G treat .de and .com the same

Trying to work out foreign googles

Matt Cutts:

More SEO Answers on Video

If you need more, try:

"host location" site:www dot webmasterworld dot com 37 Hits.

[incrediblehelp]

Yes if your target is the UK, then hosting and using a co.uk TLD is necessary to compete. more from Google Webmaster Central:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts

[hostBrain]

What Webnauts said

Originally Posted by chandrika

If a site that got alot of US traffic, was moved from a US server to a server physically located in the UK, is it a possibility that some of the US traffic could be lost?

Yes, you will lose some us traffic

[nashville]

What about where an IP address is?

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by nashville

What about where an IP address is?

Sure that makes a difference as stated above.

[hostBrain]

Originally Posted by nashville

What about where an IP address is?

Yep, that's server location. And it matters when it comes to country-specific searches

[blitzen]

This is an interesting concern for us.
Does anyone have any real data supporting this claim?

We're a legal US business with a host in Canada.
99% of our customers are from the US.
Our domain is ".com".

Why would G work against a global economy?

[wige]

Originally Posted by blitzen

Why would G work against a global economy?

It's not really about working against a global economy, it is a clue for the search engines to use when wieghing the results, because sites from anywhere in the world can get a .com domain, the server location can be the only clue as to the country of origin for the site. And, it could in theory promote the global economy by encouraging companies to purchase hosting in the various countries/regions where they are marketing their products.

[ziggy1570]

Originally Posted by kgun

The best solution is perhaps to use both a dot.com and .co.uk domain where the first is hosted in the USA and the second in U.K. . .

I would agree. Curious, though, I have a '.com' site hosted by a company located in England that has 3 DNS servers; one in the U.S.
The site was originally hosted in the U.S. but I changed and have noticed no degree of loss in U.S. ranking or visitors.

At the same time, no increase in British visitors that I have noticed; therefore the .co.uk makes a good deal of sense.

[hostBrain]

Originally Posted by blitzen

This is an interesting concern for us.
Does anyone have any real data supporting this claim?

We're a legal US business with a host in Canada.
99% of our customers are from the US.
Our domain is ".com".

Well, you could look at it from the other way around.
Canadians doing a search for you or your products, could have you coming up before any of your competitors that have their website's in the US

[Orion]

Originally Posted by blitzen

This is an interesting concern for us.
Does anyone have any real data supporting this claim?

We're a legal US business with a host in Canada.
99% of our customers are from the US.
Our domain is ".com".

Why would G work against a global economy?

Bitzen,

Do an IP lookup on your domain.. chances are that it is actually hosted in the US anyway. most 'Canadian' Hosts use US DataCentres...

Also North America is pretty much the same market, and in our case it makes very little if any difference. Where it does make a difference is over seas and definitely different countries.

Sometimes it will make a difference locally with speed on very high volume sites, I've moved some clients to data centers in the middle of their market eg. having a site hosted in california can result in dramatically less network nodes (hops) to pass through resulting in a much faster site than if it had been hosted say in NY.

We have both Canadian and US clients on our servers in the US and on our servers in Canada. for they still all rank very well.

Some countries it makes a HUGE difference. In the past and possibly still in someplaces, country specific TLDs were required to be hosted within the country borders but this does a ppear to be loosening up. (we just transfered some .co.jp sites to one of our clients servers down in the US).

note: I do try to put .ca domains on our Canadian servers... though I didn't notice a difference in the rankings locally or internationally.

[blitzen]

Orion,

Thanks for the insight. Our IP is definitely Canada and has been for 5+ years. We noticed a huge PR drop (out of G for a few months, too) and loss of sales (50%) when Big Daddy came to fruition early last year. We also changed our ecommerce software at that time so I don't know what was the culprit - probably both. We slowly recovered, almost. Still not to where we should be or were at.

Here is what our host said about the foreign host.

"From what I've read, and I have looked into it; the domain name extension is what is used for consideration. Not the geographic location of the servers. We have several UK clients that I know of who switched from the .com to .co.uk version of their domains (forwarding the .com version to the .co.uk) and saw an immediate increase in ranking from several search engines. Those clients are still hosted with us in Canada.

Good hosting is more about having your domain available all the time to be indexed by the engines. No doubt one day the search engines will start favoring one hosting company over others, but that will probably be the day when Google buys out the world....

Seriously, several hosting companies block search engine spiders - especially googlebot. A good deep googlebot crawl can eat up a LOT of resources server side (1000's of page requests per second) and can last for days. If the server can't handle it then the customer gets no rankings and is removed from the index. Several big hosts in the USA do this but I don't feel free to toss out names like a mean spirited cousin.

Just like the silly dedicated IP per domain myth. A virtually hosted domain on a shared IP can get a very high ranking. The only time people seem to be penalised is when they irrelevantly over-link their domains on the same shared IP in an attempt to falsely garner higher rankings.
Many search engine's look specifically for this and penalise sites for it.

We have some clients with PR 6 and higher on shared hosting that I can think of off the top of my head. Which is based on Google.com, not .ca.
Heck, the vast majority of our customers are either US based or targeting US customers. We also have a dozen or so UK webmasters who are a tight group of friends doing a lot of SEO works on blogs and such who are doing quite well from my understanding. Also a few SEO guys from Brazil, Germany and Australia that I can think of...

Honestly, most of our clients seem to be the SEO type. Small sites consuming small amount of bandwidth on fast stable servers. People wanting large, cheap virtual hosting seem to go elsewhere and that's fine by us.

If you have any thoughts, feel free to share. We had a datacenter in the USA but closed it. We could always open a new one down there if there was enough demand. As it is, Vancouver and Montreal seem to be enough to satisfy most."

[Orion]

sounds about right Blitzen.

From what I've seen if you have a country specific TLD (.ca / .co.uk / .au / .co.jp etc.) it makes a difference as to whether you have those domains hosted in country or out.

For .com (not country specific) it doesn't seem to matter as much.

Also if you want rankings in a country other than USA you can be better served with a country specific TLD... eg.. I have clients who ONLY deal in Canada for their business and they noticed better rankings when we moved their sites to .ca domains from .com (ONLY in google.ca their rankings in google.com deteriorated a bit (page 1 to page 10-20)). But when you're in Canada and you go to google.com it automatically reads we're in Canada and changes it to google.ca (unless you know how to go around that which isn't too hard).

On the dedicated IP bit.. they are also correct... Where IPs definitely make a difference is your IBLs if the majority of your IBLs are all on the same IP (or IP block) they are not found to be as relevant since many SEO's used to create many many domains to point to one domain to boost rankings.

Unless you have a .us extension I can't see it making a whole lot of difference. I saw reference to length of time and reliability.. those are the key things to worry about when it comes to hosting. But I wouldn't move my servers overseas if north america was my target. =o)

[webmax]

Here in Latin America it looks like the domain extensions are influencing G. G won't pick up content from a country-specific domain that is in the "wrong" language. Say, if you have a .co.cr domain (for Costa Rica, which is de facto a bilingual country) and the website has both an English and a Spanish side, G just won't index the English pages. Right now this particular site that we designed and optimized is showing up in #1, 3, 10, in several search strings in Spanish but not at all in English. It is hosted in Germany, by the way. On the other hand, we optimized a .com site, hosted in the US, with an index in 2 languages and it shows up if you look for it either in Spanish or English. It won't show up, though, if you choose the "Show only pages in Costa Rica" button in G. So what I do now is register both a .com and a .co.cr domain for bilingual sites. At least in this case it does not seem to matter where it's hosted.

[Orion]

Seems that some people still think .com is a US extension?

.com, .net, .org are international TLD's not country specific.

The original idea (purpose) behind them was as follows: .com was for commercial use, .net was for companies whose business was about Networking the Internet etc., and .org was for Not-for-profit organizations... as .edu was for educational facilities (non-us and us alike), .gov is US government too, they kinda took that one lol.

the equivalent to a .co.uk, .ca, .au etc in the US is .us.

[dbramley]

I think if you host with 1 & 1 in the UK their servers are actually in Germany.. do your research before selecting on a host!

However, I have a number of UK websites, some with .com extensions and all are hosted in the US. My content is very UK based so I think that makes up for it?

Also the US servers are very, very cheap! You will pay 3 - 5 x as much for the UK equivalent.

[andyf]

Server location and the domain extension (tld used ) affects ranking for your domain, I mean if you are targetting UK traffic then having UK based server with UK tld as ( .co.uk, .uk.com ) will help you to rank well in local search for UK.

[ronlee67]

What a great question!

I moved our domain from being hosted by ICDSoft in Hong Kong to their Boston, MA USA facility last year. This was done because of a swarm of denial of service attacks against the Hong Kong servers at that time.

Since that time the traffic to our site has increased dramatically, and more important, the conversion rate to sales improved even more.

I had thought our exposure via listings on Shopping.com and Google base were the reason for the increase but now that you brought this subject up I am convinced the bulk of the improvement came through the relocation of our domain stateside.

We have discontinued our listings on Shopping.com and I don't believe it has made any significant difference. Referrals from Google/Froogle have been lackluster but you can't beat the price so we are sticking with them.

Ron

[DBritton]

I have been working for a client in Germany trying to attract business from the states.

I have servers in Germany and in the states. If I search using the same search engine from Germany or VPN in to one of my US servers and change my time zone, I get two totally different results. This works in both directions mysite.de (location Germany) or mysite.com (location Seattle USA). The Server location and the searcher location both seem to play a roll in the results. Servers are cheep I would suggest putting up multiple copies of the web site in each of your target markets and link them to the main project, especially if you are international.