Is SEO affected by server location?

[magic2147]

Co-incidentally Web Design Festival has an article "How to Create a Website for Foreign Markets in 7 Steps" which as some relevance to this discussion. I am not allowed to post links ATM but a Google search should track it down.

[snakeman]

Thanks magic2147, for the heads up (a post you made on page one).
We recently moved two .com.au domains from an Australian to USA server and so far the SEO and SERP rankings have not noticeably changed, with one frequentrly winning it's exact name domain search.
This appears to agree with the above.
I'll let you know if anything changes.
All the best

[deepsand]

Could you explain?

I live in Australia and I don't want to see irrelevant American results.

Where a server is physically located says nothing about its desired target audience. Those intentions are signalled by various means as earlier noted.

At your end, your preferences are determines by your Location and Languages settings; and, if you so elect, by the Google TLD that you direct your queries to.

[deepsand]

Is there any possibility of being able to select English for a main language in GWT and a different language for a subdomain? I currently have a site done in five different languages. Its separated by /es/ for spanish, /fr/ for French and so on.

Google does that by presuming that each language is implicitly so targeted by intent.

[Tiggerito]

Where a server is physically located says nothing about its desired target audience. Those intentions are signalled by various means as earlier noted.

http://support.google.com/webmasters...n&answer=62399

"setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country"

Implying the GWMT region setting is just about how you get regionally filtered and does not influence search positioning. Can we also assume a region setting determined by IP works the same and has no influence on search positioning?

Interestingly, IP is not the only signal they use to guess a websites region.

They also imply it is best not to set the region setting if you're international. Using the word "restrict" implying it may actually reduce your international presence. I've dropped it on my website to see if there is any impact. It is hosted in Australia and was set to Australia so I will look to see if my international traffic increases.

Conclusion: IP locations only influence is if a person chooses to filter by country and your website provides no better signal to say you're from that country. So a servers physical location does say something about its desired target audience, but only as a last resort and only affects the few cases where people filter by country.

[deepsand]

Google will always have the user's local Location and Language settings, along with the Google TLD chosen by the user.

[Tiggerito]

Google will always have the user's local Location and Language settings, along with the Google TLD chosen by the user.

Unless:

You use a VPN
You use a Google domain (TLD) outside your region
you hide Language settings, disable cookies

so not always

[bhartzer]

If you go into Google Webmaster Tools, (assuming you have verified your site there) you can target users in a certain country. Click on Site Configuration / Settings and you will see the 'geographic target' checkbox and drop-down. I prefer to not specify a certain country (checkbox off and nothing selected), but for certain ccTLDs you'll want to specify a location here (e.g., domain.com.au or domain.com.mx or domain.es)

[Steiner]

Our experience has been that if you have a country level domain (like .com.au) you can rank well regardless of where the server is located. We have been able to get a site with a GTLD domain ranked well for searches from Australia even though the server is located outside of Australia - it's all a matter of how the site is SEO'd and whether the Webmaster tools has been configured correctly.

Whoever wrote "Server location has absolutely everything to do with how your website ranking. This why Google introduced "local search"" clearly they do not understand that the whole idea of local search is that if a a searcher is logged in as a Google user and has set their location properly (and probably that their ISP has set up the connection IP properly and not used a generic physical address) Google will try to present results that are relevant to the search and the searcher. For instance if Bill the Battler in Bilpin searches for "slabs home delivery", Google will try to, (if he is logged in as a Google user and has set his location etc) give him the sites of the bottleohs in Bilpin and adjacent areas and not those 675 kms away in Bourke.

It's an inexact science this SEO stuff and there is a lot of voodoo around (never mind the bulldust) but one furphy that deserves to be knocked on the head quicksmart is the relevance of server location ie. nil. Be warned - anyone who tries to tell you otherwise does not understand the intertubes or is feeding you a line.

Ok; all of these comparisons from Australia are just not applicable outside the continent. SEO in Australia is incredibly easy compared to other places.
I have seen work done for companies there progress them to 1st page positions, the same work in the UK or US would not move a website of similar age and in the same sector past page 4 or 5 at best!

SEO is anything but an inexact science and if practised properly is the result of the analysis of large numbers of websites both client and resource being tweaked to give the best possible results. Multivariate testing on a large scale WILL give a definitive figure for many aspects of SEO.
Do you think the best companies on the market get consistent top results by guesswork?

Let's be straight server location is critical. I have just finished compiling ranking reports for 60 websites and I can tell you that across the board they rank best in the location of the server. They also rank more quickly in the location of the server when optimisation begins.

Also this about being logged in to have a local search result offered??? Completely inaccurate, google will work from your IP address whether you are logged in or not. Logging in and setting geographical location etc is completely unnecessary for such a local search.

Re the .com.au domains of course the server location has no relevance there because the country level domain is already set to Australia! No further geo targeting information is required for country specific domains.

[deepsand]

Unless:

You use a VPN

No effect on Location setting on Google's search page.

You use a Google domain (TLD) outside your region

Which signals your preference for the search queries of the moment.

you hide Language settings

You cannot hide that which is being used for a given session.

disable cookies

Has no effect on the current session. Merely affects the persistent storage of data that would otherwise be used for future sessions.

so not always

So, yes, always.