Does server location matter?
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Hi guys,
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A friend's website is hosted in Germany (showing German IP in Flagfox) but it is a UK-based local business that only serves customers within a small radius covering 3 medium sized UK towns (they sell heavy construction materials for collection only). Should I advise him to change hosting location to the UK? Will this help him rank better for regional keyword searches & Google Places?
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He has some 'followed' links from UK sites (over 6 months old) that are not being picked up by Majestic, OSE or Webmaster Tools - is this likely to be connected to the server location?
Thanks in advance for any help!
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The main too signals google looks ta are tld and ip number, so hosting in anouther country is a problem, but as stephen has said you can use GWMT to indicate what country you want to rank in, unfortunatly this only helps with google
See matt cutts
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- Not really a need to change location. Google is aware that sites are often hosted outside of their country, there are a lot of other stronger signals that he can easily give
I assume he has a .co.uk or a .com?
- Set his location in webmaster tools to be UK
- Make sure he has a UK address on the site - footers or contact us page etc
- Set the lang in the html to en-gb
- Make sure there is UK related content on the page
- If those links are not showing up, they are likely from very weak domains that wouldn't help him even if they did show up. Go and get decent quality links!
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