IP Address Geolocation SEO - Multiple A records, implications?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

We operate an ecom site, with a .com TLD. The IP address of the hosting is based in France and indeed we seem to see quite a lot of traffic from France.

How relevant is the A record of the domain for SEO? Is it still an important signal to help Google geolocate?

And, if that is the case, is there a case for having multiple A records for the domain? Like an IP Address in France, an IP address in Italy, etc... that way the domain would have multiple A records...

Thank you

[FedeEinhorn]

Is terms of SEO, the server location does not carry any value. However, if you site loads really fast to France visitors, it just makes sense to rank your site higher to French visitors (yet again, confirming that server geolocation does not give you any SEO benefit).

As for your question, what you are trying t achieve isn't an easy task and there are entire companies dedicated to just that, DNS based on geolocation (Anycast DNS, Geo-aware DNS), which is what almost all CDNs do, serve the content of a Website from the closest server to a person connecting to a Website. My recommendation? try to get the fastest server you can in the area you mostly want to target (Europe? then get a server that works fast in europe) and then use some CDN service like maxcdn, or cloudflare to serve static, cacheable content from different locations and speed up site loading as much as possible.

That being said, Google offers some tools to help you target specific Countries, Languages regardless of the server location under Google's Webamster Tools.

Hope that helps!

[bjs2010]

Thank you.

Our server is fast, hosted in OVH France and we use MaxCDN. Using Magento we can achieve a very low TTFB and load time of around 180ms. We rank better for our kws in France than we do in other European countries although our site is not in French.

Any ideas where I can find a map of european connectivity and hosting companies?

Thanks for your help, I think that we are heading in the right direction!