17 Jan, 2010
Hosting Location and Google SEO
Google takes a lot of factors into consideration when ranking a website in search listings, and hosting location is often said to be one of them. The physical location of a website isn’t necessarily important to improve rankings in your targeted country though, contrary to popular belief.
According to John Mueller, if your ccTLD is relevant to your targeted country, then Google will not take the location of the webserver into consideration. This means that you could have your website hosted in the US but it would not make a difference to your UK rankings providing that you have a .co.uk ccTLD.
On the Google Webmaster Help Forums, John explained:
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
And then followed on to say:
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
Although this is clear enough with geographic ccTLD’s, generic TLD’s can’t be treated in the same way. In the instance of .com and other TLD’s, the IP address will be used to identify the hosting location, and thus determine what is the appropriate country that the website is local to. If your website has a general TLD, then try to ensure your hosting is relevant to your target country. Webmaster Tools can also be used to set your site’s main country.
But Hosting Location Will Be Important
Google doesn’t necessarily use your website’s hosting location as a ranking factor, but hosting will become more important with the roll out of Caffeine and an increased emphasis on speed.
If the majority of your website visitors are from the UK, then having UK hosting will ensure that download time is kept to a minimum. Also, if your files are hosted on a slow server in Australia (for example), then Google may also judge your site to be slow and therefore penalise your rankings because of that.
Tip: Monitor your Webmaster Tools profile to keep an eye on site speed.
Google’s usage of TLD’s is quite well documented, so this news may not be new to some people. It’s important to understand how country identity is established though, in order to maximise performance in local search.
Not that it matters much in the UK, as the SERPs are still a mess.
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2 | Kieron Hughes
January 17th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Hey Rhys,
Cheers for the comment.
Yeah it’s only recently I’ve considered the importance of hosting from a Caffeine point of view, but I’m sure it is something that will become more widespread with the imminent release of it. Time will tell how the changes effect the rankings!