Does Hosting Location Matter?

[sec-dee]

Does it affects your ranking in google if your hosting provider is located in Canada for example. Hosting in a respective country you would be provided an IP address from the host country.

Thanks.

 

[centerpoint]

No, It has no effect on your ranking at all

 

[steveJD]

From what I have read on the subject i would disagree. A host in the same country as the target audience does make a slight difference on rankings. A friend recently moved his host from Germany to Singapore and noticed an improvement in his rankings (his websites were Singapore and Asia targeted).

 

[poorwhitey]

yes it does. you need to be hosted in the country you want to rank well in, also the appropriate tld matters as well. you can see this in action by searching Google by country and comparing results.

 

[centerpoint]

yes it does. you need to be hosted in the country you want to rank well in, also the appropriate tld matters as well. you can see this in action by searching Google by country and comparing results.

This is just another urban legend like keyword density

I have Canadian Websites (.CA) hosted in the US and UK that rank in the top ten for their specific search term and I have .COM's hosted in Canada that rank well in the US but cannot be found in the CDN serps

It does not matter. The search engines don't give a dam where your site is hosted all they care about is the content, number of links etc

 

[ptsniper]

This is just another urban legend like keyword density

That's not true. Don't say something's incorrect until you've done some proper checking - just because your sites don't rank in their host-country's results doesn't mean geolocation does not play a factor.

Also, Google.com's web results are not US specific.

I have many new .com's hosted on servers located in the UK that are on 1st/2nd page for their terms on a generic web search, but if a UK search is specified they move to the top and the other 'foreign' sites are removed, (although sites from France, Germany etc may remain, so there may be a proximity factor at play.)

 

[alleballe]

As a wise man said here. Google does not give a dam where your site is hosted. It IS A SEARCH ENGINE!!!
Its searching for your content, links, backlinks etc. And not where your server is hosted...

 

[steveJD]

I just found the article i remeber reading a while ago when looking at this but to be fair this is an old article.

"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."

original article here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/08/server-location-cross-linking-and-web.html

 

[mockba]

you might be right about links and content, however, geo-targeting does make sense when searching through google.ca, .co.uk or .de

naturally it will look for local tlds, or websites related to that country first. while .com is an international term, i believe geo targeting will expand with increase in the new .us, .eu, .asia domains.

 

[xgnux]

I have a german site hosted at hostgaotor should i pt it on a german host?

 

[raj564]

i too have done research on this too. host location is a myth.

the most important things are:

Your TLD
and registering your site with google webmasters tool as the country you want to rank in.

Your Hostgator hosted sites should be able to rank in any country, although a colleague of mine had trouble with canada, but UK was not even a problem.

 

[xgnux]

i have a .com tld, and whole site is in german
but since i rank on 6th place with one of my main keywords it should be ok i think

 

[ukescuba]

i have co.uk sites on our US servers that rank on the first page of google.co.uk - however for new sites - if i was really targeting/optimizing for a particular country say the uk and was targeting uk searches at google.co.uk i would use a .co.uk domain and host the site in the uk... no theory behind its just the way i roll...

 

[internext2]

The only way to really know is to do straight comparison testing. Anyway if it is a factor it's a very small factor