Domain Locality vs. Domain Age

[Hamilton]

Which is the bigger factor? By this I mean and am referring to a situation where a vendor has (against best practices) located their server in a different country from their target market for, say 3 years - should one advise relocating the server location to one that is in the target markets geo-local and risk losing potency from the stability/length of prior server location? Or stick with the older association?

Thanks guys.

[watto]

My target market is Australia, I live in Australia and my site is everything Australia, but my host is in the US because it is a far better hosting service than anyone in Australia can provide and I have no issues at all. I totally dominate my 'competitive' niche in Australia including geo location stuff.

If the current server has given you no issue and you are happy with them, I would stay put........

[mjtaylor]

Conventional wisdom says that search engines do not like change. But I don't see where domain age is part of your question, though your title specifies the age and location of your domain. But I think you mean the hosting of your domain.

Google says (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/08/server-location-cross-linking-and-web.html) that your tld is more important than your IP, but that they will "look" at the IP sometimes:


. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

You might find this Q & A with Google's John Mu (http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2e61e49baa5a6eaf) even more clarifying:



Yes, we do try to find context from these two factors ... however, if your site has a geographic TLD/ccTLD (like .co.nz) then we will not use the location of the server as well. Doing that would be a bit confusing, we can't really "average" between New Zealand and the USA... At any rate, if you are using a ccTLD like .co.nz you really don't have to worry about where you're hosting your website, the ccTLD is generally a much stronger signal than the server's location could ever be.

[Hamilton]

Thanks MJ; yes I noted the inconsistency as I'd finished the posting. I meant "domain stability" if you will - same server, same registered owner, server location etc.

In the example I half-stated the situation was actually under a year not three years so we decided to move it immediately; and what can I say? Woorank liked the move pretty swiftly :)

@ watto: My antipodean brethren - do you use geo meta tags?