Local Printing Company Moving to a new IP - Will Our Rankings Change

[ChopperCharlie]

I operate a local print and direct mail company located in Houston called Catdi Printing (www.catdi.com)We do very well with our local rankings and rank 2 or 3  in our main keywords (  Houston Printing , Direct Mail Houston & eddm Houston ) We are looking to upgrade our online quoting and ordering system. The software is very expensive and the only way we can incorporate this new system is to move our site and redirect our domain. The new hosting provider is located in California and might even be hosted by Google but im not certain on this point.  Our current host provider is Hostgator and they are based in Houston so im not this provides any benefit.

I guess my main question is will this new change affect our overall regular and local rankings? I would hate to see our positions and ranking fall because of this change.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

CATDI

[tretanto]

Hi,

Your rankings should't be affected unless your new server has a lower performance. Having your business and your hosting provider in the same city is a nice coincidence but it is not required by any SEO measure

[DirkC]

Agree with Daniel - according to John Mueller from Google the location of the server is (almost) irrelevant - it's mainly the performance and the user experience that counts. Quote :'For search, specifically for geotargeting, the server's location plays a very small role, in many cases it's irrelevant'.

I guess it used to be a more important signal but currently is no longer the case - check this article on Webmaster support: "Server location (through the IP address of the server). The server location is often physically near your users and can be a signal about your site’s intended audience. Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal."

Google is quite capable of determining based on your content (address, etc) which audience you are targeting so go ahead and move your server to California.

rgds,

Dirk