Does Using Magento With Multi Sites Affect SEO

[HigherthanSEO]

We have a client who has 3 separate websites targeting the US, Australia, and the UK. Each of them has relevant ccTLD's such as: .com .com.au and .co.uk.

Our client wants to use the Magento multi-site function so it combines all the stores (which are the exact same products) and merge it into one through Magento.

These sites are all hosted in the US and had nothing to do with me haha!

I understand Rand has mentioned on a video it would be best having the websites with ccTLD's hosted in that country (if budget permits), however in this case the budget doesn't permit us to go down that road.

Has anyone any advice on this matter, has anyone did this before and had a lot of success with the SEO? At present there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about it and opinions are varied and sometimes divided.

Any help would be very much appreciated guys

Thanks,

Matt

[Highland]

The hosting does matter some... The main problem you'll have is that you have 3 different continents so 2 of them will have slower connectivity. That can negatively affect perceptions and crawling but that's about it. As far as rankings, links are a better ranking factor than hosting. Get some UK sites to link to your UK site and you should rank well in the UK.

[HigherthanSEO]

Hi Highland,

Thanks for responding to this I totally agree links are more powerful than where you are hosted, my concern is that having them altogether on the one platform (Magento) will affect the rankings in the sense that they won't be able to build up the same amount of domain authority.

The way Magento is set up you can host them on the different IP's and that would get rid of the hosting issue, but do you think it would affect SEO if they all were on the same platform (Magento) sharing the same store and having different content and Meta data etc?

I can't find any information about anyone who has tried it and had success with it from an SEO stand point.

I appreciate your input and help Highland