Have hostings location an impact on SEO

[JoLinda91]

Hello everybody

I know, that some years ago it was important that you host your site in the same country where your target audience was in relation to SEO. Because Google used that to find out which country your target audience was. But is this still important and have it an influence today regarding to SEO?

Hope there is someone who can help

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi,

yes back a few years ago it was a much bigger deal. However because of many reasons including people using generic TLD's like .com .org and .net Google went by where the website was hosted a.k.a. the IP and the top-level domain so if it was .de it would be Germany however because of rapid changes of people using different TLD's and hosting in different countries for multiple reasons Google has moved to Geo targeting via Webmaster tools. This is their official stance on this. There is other great content however I feel that this does a great job of answering it I just finished a Canadian website and could not be happier with the results. It's a.com hosted in the United States but ranks much higher and Canada than it does in the states for its keywords that were Geographic target.

Here's a URL explaining more.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en

I hope this was of help,

Thomas

[FedeEinhorn]

No, the location of the server has nothing to do with the rankings as long as your Website is served fast for your users. Load speed is an impacting factor, but not the server location.

With today's cloud servers, CDNs, etc, Websites are being served depending on the user location. Suppose you used Cloudflare, then your Website would be served to Google from LA (most likely) while a user in the U.K. will probably get your Website served from the U.K., making it actually (almost) impossible to know where it is hosted and therefore not a useful ranking factor.

Hope that helps!

[ciznerguy]

Short answer no.

Google does not care where you host.

Just make sure, as mentioned before, that load time is in par with times suggested bt the experts.

slow load time may hurt search ranking

[forex-websites]

Not so much... unless you target Baidu and China.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I do agree that cloud flare can help when creating a geo-based network. You also may want to look at different content delivery networks or using multiple content delivery networks.

Press CDN is a good example of a mixed CDN

of course if you are in Australia, or somewhere in Asia you most likely will want to host your website somewhere there.

I believe both the rack space and Amazon are available in Australia as far as hosting in Asia I honestly don't know enough about it to give an opinion.

What is really critical though is speed if I can host my website outside of whatever country I'm targeting and get a faster load time by doing that I should then use the hosting outside of the country I am targeting and use Google to target that particular country.

I hope this adds to the complete answer.

Sincerely,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

You can also use things like AWS S3 bucket or rack space cloud files as the hostname therefore making it easier to get your website closer to whatever country you are targeting. So everyone knows I believe Akamai has over 200 points of presence in the world that's quite a few and they're available through rack space cloud files.