Domain Hosting
-
I'm currently working with a client who provides products in Ireland
Is it massively beneficial for the sited to be hosted on an irish server or will there not be much difference with it being hosted in England?
-
These guys are right. I use to manage a few sites with servers located in Asia and Europe and the rankings were never affected by the location of the server. So just some hands on experience for you.
-
It wouldn't make that much of a difference, similarly being hosted in somewhere like the US wouldn't be the end of the world.
If the TLD is .ie, I feel that would have a bigger influence on Google. Similarly, you can tell Google where your Geographic target is in webmaster tools. In the configuration drop-down menu, click settings and ensure that your Geographic target is set up for Ireland.
I mean, the absolute best practice would be to have a .ie domain, targeted in WMT for Ireland with Irish hosting - but I just don't know how feasible or cost effective this would be for you. In this case, 2 out of 3 certainly is not bad. If I was asked whether the hosting, in this case, is likely to have any visible difference, then I'd say no.
-
Great. Thanks
-
I would say there's very very very little difference.
I have UK sites hosted on US servers and they perform extremely well in UK search engines.
Providing your website gives clear signals to Google that the site is targeted to Ireland (Currency in EUROs, Business Address, Links from business's in the local country) I'm sure you will rank just fine in Google.ie.
Hope that helps,
Woody
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Moving content to a new domain
I need to move a lot of content with podcasts and show notes to a new domain. Instead of doing redirects, we want to keep some content on the current domain to retain the link value. There are business reason to keep content on both websites but the new website will primarily be used for SEO moving forward.If we keep the audio portion of the podcast on the old website and move the show notes and the audio portion of the podcast to the new website, is there any issues with duplicate content?Long-term, I presume Google will re-index the old and the new pages, thus no duplicate content, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything. I was planning to fetch pages in Search Console as we migrate content.Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | JimmyFritz0 -
Subdirectories and Domain Authority
Hello, A subdirectory consolidates domain authority vs a ccTLD approach. However, for example, if a domain has been well established in the UK i.e example.com, is that domains authority diluted if a subdirectory is created i.e example.com/es Will some of the link juice attained on www.example.com be shared throughout www.example.com/es and therefore initially impact search visibility for www.example.com? I understand it works both ways as well, as any links attained on www.example.com/es will benefit the example.com domain. Thanks
Technical SEO | | SEONOW1230 -
Value of domain name for domain authority. Please help to figure out!
I am doing SEO for an appliance repair company. Their company website's domain doesn't have high authority, and I am going to increase that by link earning and content improving. I think a better domain name might also help me out. The current URL contain the word "appliance" but doesn't have "repair" in it. I am thinking a new domain that would contain both keywords will serve better. Could you please share with me your thought on this? Am I in the right direction, or not at all? I know Google penalizes mirror sites since this they are considered as duplicated content. I'll upload my content to the new domain and make the old one point to that new URL. I am wondering if canonical might help? Or 301 redirect will be a better solution? Any advise would be highly appreciated! Thank you!
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
Which domain we should continue with?
Hello All, We are working with a client who had manual penalty from Google. We worked on that and now penalty has been removed. Client had already started working on the new domain and now the big dilemma is- Which domain should we continue with? Old or New? We are suggesting them to continue with the old one as that domain had good PR, good backlinks, better visibility on their social profiles etc. What do you suggest? any inputs are highly appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | sachin-sv0 -
Old domain still being crawled despite 301s to new domain
Hi there, We switched from the domain X.com to Y.com in late 2013 and for the most part, the transition was successful. We were able to 301 most of our content over without too much trouble. But when when I do a site:X.com in Google, I still see about 6240 URLs of X listed. But if you click on a link, you get 301d to Y. Maybe Google has not re-crawled those X pages to know of the 301 to Y, right? The home page of X.com is shown in the site:X.com results. But if I look at the cached version, the cached description will say :This is Google's cache of Y.com. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on July 31, 2014." So, Google has freshly crawled the page. It does know of the 301 to Y and is showing that page's content. But the X.com home page still shows up on site:X.com. How is the domain for X showing rather than Y when even Google's cache is showing the page content and URL for Y? There are some other similar examples. For instance, you would see a deep URL for X, but just looking at the <title>in the SERP, you can see it has crawled the Y equivalent. Clicking on the link gives you a 301 to the Y equivalent. The cached version of the deep URL to X also shows the content of Y.</p> <p>Any suggestions on how to fix this or if it's a problem. I'm concerned that some SEO equity is still being sequestered in the old domain.</p> <p>Thanks,</p> <p>Stephen</p></title>
Technical SEO | | fernandoRiveraZ1 -
Multiple (different) domains and canonicalisation
Hello, We've had experience with canonical tags for various domains before, such as tidying up product categories etc... However, can anyone point me to any guidelines about different domains using canonicalisation. For example: If I had the following sites, all with identical content - exampledomain.com completelydifferentdomain.net anothertotallydifferentdomain.com With canonical tags pointing to the first one (exampledomain.com), could this be harmful? Is it better to 301 redirect the other sites? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Sarbs0 -
301 for old domain to new domain - Joomla plugin or cpanel?
A client changed domains and both are being indexed. There are thousands of content pages. I can install a 301 redirect Joomla plugin and configure it so that each page redirects to the new domain. I have a feeling I will need to manual set every page. OR I can create a domain level redirect setting in cpanel using wildcards. I think this will automatically pass every old URL to the new URL. Which is the better approach? The cpanel option sounds like less work.
Technical SEO | | designquotes0 -
Domain Masking with New Keyword-Rich Domains
Hello, friends. We have an ecommerce site and we also own several keyword-rich domains but haven't done anything with them yet. Is there any value in using domain masking to point them to either product pages or special landing pages on our primary ecommerce site? Here's an example: Primary site is widgetzone.com Keyword rich URL is acmewidget.com (which is totally blank and isn't indexed) It could point to our category page for Acme Widgets: widgetzone.com/category/acme-widgets or it could point to a new landing page: widgetzone.com/acme-widgets My concern is that because the keyword-rich URL hasn't been utilized at all there's really no point in redirecting it. I'm of the mind that it's either going to be ineffective at best or a duplicate content issue at worst. What do you guys think? As a follow-up, if we don't redirect these domains, what should we do with them? Just try to sell them off rather than create totally new sites?
Technical SEO | | jbreeden0