Does server location affect rankings?
-
Hey guys,
I'm just wondering whether you can help me out here.
We're considering moving our servers to a new country but are a little hesitant to what - if any - SEO impact it would have on our clients' sites.
For instance, if all of our clients are UK-based but their server isn't, would that affect their rank in Google UK?
Or is it simply just a case of whether moving a server would affect the site speed or not?
-
Hi Matthew
The IP location it's a signal although it used to be stronger in the past but is still is. Take into consideration that is not the only signal to inform Google that your site is relevant towards a specific country: The usage of a ccTLD or geolocating in Google Webmaster Tools, plus specifying the region also in the hreflang annotations and your content itself: adding the location where it's targeted to in the different elements of the pages, are also additional signals that you should align as much as you can to inform Google where is your relevant country market.
So when someone asks me this question looking to move their site towards a local hosting or a service that can provide the IP of the country where the site is targeting what I ask is that if it also makes sense to make the move for other reasons (better speed for your visitors in that country, better support, etc.) and from a cost perspective, then they should do it. Nonetheless, if it's a painful migration that will cost too much and they still have other factors to optimize, then I would likely recommend to see first the impact of these other aspects that won't cost that much to implement.
In your case is different, since from what you say is about "moving away" your server from the relevant country, then in this situation is about saving or earning in other aspects that are not SEO since you will be taking away a signal that you were already providing. So instead of this what I would do first is to try to find another service that can keep providing you the UK IP and that also meets your other requirements, trying to keep the signal you were already giving while achieving the goals you're looking to have by changing your hosting service.
In the case this is impossible, then yes, you would likely have to assume you will be losing a bit of the "geotargeted" relevance you were already giving, and in dependence how you're optimizing the other relevant factors towards this, it might have a stronger or weaker effect.
Thanks!
-
Matthew, I believe you have stumbled upon one instance of why SEO is so confusing to many people. There is a lot of complexity and the answer varies based on the situation.
I believe you have taken the above quote from: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=62399. I would always encourage you to share the source of any quote, so others may evaluate it within full context.
You shared you "found on numerous discussions and boards" information. Once again, I am confident you can find mis-information on any SEO related topic on "numerous boards". In 2011 when I was working with sites penalized for manipulative links, many sites had posts stating "Google will never penalize for manipulative links. They can't...." On our journey towards "SEO truth" please share the exact source.
Back to the point in hand, I would gently suggest you may be doing your clients a disservice by changing their geo-target. As it says in the same article from G, " ...if you have a site in French that you want users in France, Canada, and Mali to read -- we don't recommend that you use this tool to set France as a geographic target."
While some of your clients may only target local search results and therefore can be geo-targeted to the UK (a restaurant for example), you may service other clients who have a strong desire to rank in neighboring countries. Setting a geo-target for the UK may impact the site's rankings in other countries.
Why would you consider moving server locations? I am not passing judgment, but it sounds like you may be changing your client's server for your convenience, not theirs. My agency maintains a dedicated server in Florida, which works very well for US companies targeting a European audience. It would be more convenient for us to move our Canadian clients to our server, but it is not in the client's interest for us to make the move. Even if a client requested the change we would try to talk them out of it if the target audience was primarily Canadian.
-
Hi Ryan,
Apologies if my last response was a little vague. In answer to my question, along with some answers from SEO moz, and with my own thoughts in mind, prompted me to look a little deeper.
I found on numerous boards and discussions that the server location now has little benefit i.e. its very unlikely you will get any SEO boost directly from location.
To sum up, and with help from the Big G itself:
" If you change hosting provider for a country domain, there should be no impact. If you change the hosting provider of an international domain to a provider in another country, we recommend using Webmaster Tools to tell us which country your site should be associated with." In either case, there will be no impact.
The Matt Cutts video is now over 4 years old, and a lot has happened in that time. Server location is no longer a factor all things being the same.
However, the speed of that server is, as Kevin rightly says. However, Kevin also says the "most stable sites use domestic servers" - so I guess it depends what is domestic to you. i.e. If Kevins server is in the US and I am in the UK, and his domestic server is the most stable, fast and reliable, then switching my hosting to the US from the UK should only benefit my site, as it will be faster, more stable and more reliable - so as long as I set my location within webmaster tools, i'll be good to go.
Hope this helps.
-
Matthew, your statement conflicts itself. You shared you are "reliably informed" but then you seem to be questioning the reliability of that information.
This community is about learning. We would all love to know the correct answer. You asked if the country of a web server's location mattered. Three people responded and we all seem to agree that, to the best of our knowledge, it does matter. If you have reliable information to the contrary, please share the source and details.
-
Thanks guys.
I'm reliably informed that it doesn't now affect SEO and that Google video is out of date.
Would this be correct?
-
A part of Google Algo is most likely server response time/stability and more likely than not, the most stable sites use domestic servers.
-
Moving a server outside of the country of your target audience can impact ranking. A server located in UK is an indicator the site is more likely to be relevant to the UK.
With the above noted, there are numerous other methods you can use to show relevancy such as setting the site's geo-target in Google WMT, using the meta language tag such as "EN-UK" and showing a physical address within the UK
-
As long as your server is located in the country your business is located I think you are fine. I would find it odd if in the Google's Algorithm it weights server location with any significance. Although I could also see that having a foreign hosting location could have an impact on Google.
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
-
Awful ranking after site redesign
Hello everyone, I have a situation here and I’d like to have your opinion about it. I am working on a site which has been recently redesigned from scratch: in a nutshell, as soon as the new site went live their rankings dropped and, of course, so did their visitors and so on.. The guys who redesigned the site didn’t do any 301 redirect whatsoever, so now the old pages are just 404s and blocked by robots. My question is: if they 301 redirect now, do you think it would be possible they could get their rankings back? One more thing: when they launched the new site, the indexed pages basically doubled overnight; there were 700 and now there are 1400. Do you think this could affect their ranking as well? Thank you for you insights 🙂 Elio
Technical SEO | | Eyah0 -
My website is not avaliable, will i lose ranking?
My website was not available during 12 hours and i think that i will lose ranking by that. What do you think about it? Will i lose rankings? Some URL were lost during the drop of server, what should i do? Create again? Delete on GWT? Thanks so much.
Technical SEO | | pompero990 -
My g+ picture stopped showing up on my rankings. What do I do?
How do I get my g+ picture to start showing up again? It just stopped showing up, and I'm not sure how to get it to come back. Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Are the duplicate content and 302 redirects errors negatively affecting ranking in my client's OS Commerce site?
I am working on an OS Commerce site and struggling to get it to rank even for the domain name. Moz is showing a huge number of 302 redirects and duplicate content issues but the web developer claims they can not fix those because ‘that is how the software in which your website is created works’. Have you any experience of OS Commerce? Is it the 302 redirects and duplicate content errors negatively affecting the ranking?
Technical SEO | | Web-Incite0 -
Subdomain hosted on a different server VS Subfolder on main server
We have a website developed in ColdFusion on a server does not support PHP. We have a blog for the site using WordPress (PHP), hosted on a different server, with a subdomain as the URL. (example: blog.website.com) I've heard that search engines treat subdomains as completely different websites from the main domain, so they could actually be in competition for rankings in the search engines - is that correct? I am under the impression that the traffic to the blog will not show as traffic to the main website, because it is hosted on a different server - is that right? If I am correct, I assume the best solution would be to install PHP on our main server, and put the blog in a subfolder ... or would the subdomain be OK as long as the blog is hosted on the main server? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | vermont0 -
Location targeting with no physical location
If you have no physical premises (i.e. operate online) but you only serve clients in a specific area, what is best practice for targeting a local area? I know G. Places can be used if you have a premises, and that .co.uk / hosting server location make a difference, but beyond that... ? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | underscorelive1 -
Does server location matter?
Hi guys, 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? 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!
Technical SEO | | Tman30 -
Google rankings tanked....Now what?
We just experience a drop in Google rankings, some pretty harsh, across all of the keywords we have been ranking greater than 50. I’m a noob at SEO, but a technical noob so I started doing my home work. I’ve seen references to the “google dance” and “Honeymoon”, but this hit seems to have effected competitors too. Everyone seems re-ranked with several junk directories jumping up more than I think they should. Has anyone else seen this? Is this more Google algorithm adjustment or a natural settling based on our new SEO attempts? In either case, what should we do next? I know there is a holistic approach and everything is important however, we need bang for the buck at this point to before we start bleeding. One or two next steps? Our industry is residential cleaning and the site is www.bitabliss.com Here is a little history:
Technical SEO | | BitABliss
The site that’s been running for about 2 years. We initially put up a very basic “throw something up” site without much thought of SEO except for some basics and a long tail approach with a blog, FaceBook and Twitter. We launched an updated site on Feb 23. with new theme and this time some, “on page” work to better hit the basics. The site structure was kept the same and we added on some more localized content in hopes to take advantage of local searches. Also, enter SEOMoz to get us tracking things (Yay MOZ). Until yesterday, we had been doing pretty well in some of our target cites even with the more basic site. When we launched the new site focusing on page titles, descriptions and page content, and a few directory attempts. We started to see some incremental growth. It seemed to me that this kind of growth meant that we were doing the right things and doing a better job than some of the other sites. Any way, yesterday we got smacked down. This seems too harsh for a for the slow increases we have seen over the last month. Any thoughts you have would be great appreciated. Thanks! -Shawn1