Domain Hosting

[Sandeep_Matharu]

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?

[William.Lau]

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.

[TomRayner]

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.

[Sandeep_Matharu]

Great. Thanks

[seowoody]

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