Local hosts for sites in foreign countries?

[TexaSEO]

Hi everyone.  I'm going to be launching localized websites in 5 different european countries (.de, .it. etc).

Must I have a local host with servers in those countries or can I use a U.S. based host?  WOuld having a U.S. based host hurt SEO?

[dmac]

We are a US based company, but also do a lot of business in many other countries. Though most of our customers are in the states, many of our vendors are abroad. Our vendors need access to our website too. During a trip a few months ago, one of our vendors commented that our website took over 5 minutes to load.

I did some searching and found that putting our site on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) would solve this problem. We ended up using www.cloudflare.com for this. Basically, they put your content on different servers around the world and serve it up from the server that's closest to your visitor.

I tested our website during my last visit and the difference was AMAZING! Cloud flare also speeds up your website, but that's a different conversation. There was a little technical learning involved and a glitch here and there. Overall, I'm pretty happy with Cloudflare. BTW, you will still need to host your sites somewhere, Cloudflare is not a host.

Their basic service is free and they have a Pro version for $20.00 per month. I have the pro service, but could get by with the basic service if we were on a tight budget. I find the pro version is worth the extra 20 bucks.

[Thos003]

Perhaps its superstition, but most site owners that I know prefer to host sites in the region of their TLD. It seems that this could be a trust factor from Google.

[dmac]

I agree completely, this will improve both credibility and speed.

From an SEO standpoint, I think each site needs to be written in the native language of the country that your targeting.

I would also suggest doing a little research on the cultures of your target countries.

example: China
Top search engine is not Google, it's Baidu
Facebook isn't accessible from China, they use QQ (600+ million subscribers)
Youtube isn't accessible from China, not sure what they use.
Adult sites are completely illegal in China
Don't comment about political issues, no such thing as free speech.

I'm sure other countries aren't as drastic as China, but the local cultures, trends, and laws will all differ from yours.

[TexaSEO]

Thanks so much everyone for the responses so far! Hmm, sounds like it might be what I thought.

However an interesting thing came up yesterday which prompted me to ask the question.  One of our partners in Mexico uses a US based host for their website.  They said their local host was unreliable.

So I'm thinking either they aren't focusing on SEO or the fact that their site isn't hosted in Mexico doesn't matter.

Thoughts?

[sjr4x4]

This is one of those debates that goes backwards and forwards. Personally I can only go from experience, and to date SEO hasn't been a factor in our server location. We used to host our UK directory in the UK, but the service and technical support from big players was awful, and we had ongoing repeated outages. Reputation and uptime was more important than geographic location, so after a few reccomendations, we moved our hosting to EV1 who were in Texas, they then became Planet, and are now Softlayer. But as much as it pains me to say it, the service in the US has been outstanding, uptime perfect.

3 years later, with Google now considering response times as a signal, we decided our transaction times were too slow. So after 3 wonderful outage free years, moved our UK sites back to the UK. Within 2 weeks, our first outage, 2 months later another very costly outage We have now bitten the bullet and are migrating again to Rackspace and hope their fanatical support lives up to its name. Time will tell...

Between moving backwards and forwards, UK, USA, UK we saw no direct correlation in traffic or rankings.

For Europe, personally I'd find the best European Data Centre you can and host everything out of their for Europe. Theres no need to have  a server in France, one in Belgium, one in Germany, UK etc. Our US sites are still based in Texas, but transaction times and SEO is unaffected in North Dakota. If it ever does slow down, then I'd consider another box somewhere in the top half of the US. In Europe, I'd consider the same strategy, let transaction and response times dictate locations.

Agree totally about cultural differences, factor that in and present your content in the local style of the target audience.

[TexaSEO]

Hey Steve...your answer completely supports my research today.

From Google:

Geotargeting factors

Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):

1. Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
   or
   Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!).
2. Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
3. Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).