Is it better to have hosting that specializes in performance or have the host closer to you physically?
-
I am looking to change to a new hosting company.
I am debating between taking a company that specializes in Wordpress and performance but is situated far from my users or a local company that might not be as good from a performance/speed point of view.
Which do you think I should go with?
My users are near Europe and the Wordpress hosting that I am considering is in the US.
-
Improving your speed will help more from an SEO perspective as Google likes to count it towards the 'visitor experience'. Country specific really makes little difference these days, especially as many businesses use content caching such as Cloudflare - which could be based anywhere.
-
Hi Jill,
I'll always take speed and having a server in another country over having a server local and not having any speed advantages. Mostly, but this is just my take on this, because the factor on how a local server improves your ranking is so small you probably will never see a result on this in your rankings or your organic search traffic. This probably will be the case if you improve for speed, it will decrease the load time for your users hopefully and also decrease the time it takes for Google to download your pages.
Besides this, there are other functionalities to make sure Google is right about the country your site is targeting. Think about: href lang tags, more local signals as in links or company profiles and ofcourse geotargeting within Google Webmaster Tools.
Would absolutely love to hear the arguments for somebody disagreeing on this!
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
-
Two websites, one company, one physical address - how to make the best of it in terms of local visibility?
Hello! I have one company which will be operating in two markets, printing and website design / development. I’m planning on building two websites, each for every market. But I’m a bit confused about how to optimize these websites locally. My thought is to use my physical address for one website (build citations, get listed in directories, etc. ) and PO Box for another. Do you think there is a better idea?
Technical SEO | | VELV1 -
Would a Search Engine treat a sitemap hosted in the cloud in the same way as if it was simply on /sitemap.htm?
Mainly to allow updates without the need for publishing - would Google interpret any differently? Thanks
Technical SEO | | RichCMF0 -
Whats better? A modified .COM EMD or Pure EMD on a new extension?
HI I am planing to built a site. Lets say my keyword is "playgames". I can take for example the domain playgamesnow.com, filler domain. Or I can take playgames.new extension. A pure EMD. My question is whats better?Is it worth to register the domain on a new ( but suitable ) extension just to be shorter and EMD. Or its better to take the modified.COM ( longer and not EMD ). But its a .com It will be a big site, I plan to make an authority, long lasting site. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | Catinas970 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
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 -
Is it better to have text is separate hidden divs or text stored in Javascript?
would it be better if: 1. I have all the text in separate hidden divs or 2. or all the text is stored in javascript?
Technical SEO | | Personnel_Concept0 -
Google rankings dropped dramatically after 24 hrs of hosting suspension
Hi, One of my websites ( http://www.traveldestinationsearch.com/ ) dropped most of its Google rankings after 24 hours of hosting suspension (from April 26 until April 27, 2012). The hosting company suspended my website after exceeding the bandwidth limit: there was no unusual activity on my website, it just exceeded its bandwidth limit by 20-30MB for the previous month. Anyway, the website is back online since April 27 but the problem is that, following these 24 hrs of no service, I see a dramatic decrease of my website's Google rankings for its main keywords. Even today, April 29, I can't find my website anywhere in the first 100 results for most of its targeted keywords. Before the suspension, the website ranked #1 for its main keyword and somewhere in the first 2-3 pages of Google search results for other two main keywords. My question is: is it the hosting suspension the reason for the Google ranking drop, and (assuming this is a temporary problem) when do you think I should expect my website to regain the rankings it had before the hosting suspension? Thanks for your support. Regards, Adrian
Technical SEO | | AdrianBanu0 -
Cloud Hostings & SEO Effects
Is there any negative to cloud hosting? I believe they share the same IP addresses but is it true you can still get banned if someone else on a shared IP or server does some spam?
Technical SEO | | iAnalyst.com0