Hosting your website where you customers are located ?
-
Is it possible and recommended to host a website in Switzerland ending in.com to rank in the United States ?
Or is it better to host it in the country you are targeting ? I know in WMT you can choose the country you want to target but is it as efficient as hosting it on a server located in the country ?
Thanks,
-
Thank you,
-
Hi,
Because it is still understood to be an SEO signal, I would be erring on the side of caution and going with hosting in the country where the client / visitors are located.
John Mueller did confirm that it might have a small benefit, but as there has been little additional confirmation of this recently, I would avoid hosting in a different country if the option is available.
https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-geo-location-server-google-17468.html
-Andy
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
-
Redirect entire website or not?
I have 2 websites: a UK health blog covering a wide range of topics (professional medical advice, diets, mental health), core business, strong brand, content ranks well, lots of valuable traffic, only 100 external links but all of good quality. We also sell some of our UK consultancy services on the site. small niche blog just covering fitness, every page has robots=noindex, 100x more traffic, 100% of traffic is from 500,000 external links on other websites talking about fitness matters (these range from spam to medium quality) , 95% of traffic is from countries we cannot serve, probably only 1% of the remaining 5% of traffic would be considered our target market, but the main concern is that the content is very out of date and should anyone see, it would be damaging to the UK health blog My dilemma is what do we do with the fitness website to make most business use, while ensuring little maintenance? Suggestions have been: Keep fitness blog running but make very basic content updates and remove robots=noindex Redirect fitness website urls to appropriate pages on UK health website We are on the verge of choosing option 2 but I have some SEO concerns about the impact of the redirects on the UK health website. Due to the volume of external links which mostly all reference 'fitness', is there any risk through redirects that Google might start thinking the UK health website is just about fitness? If so, is there any way to prevent this through certain redirects eg 307? Also with the fitness website having some spam related external links, is there any risk to the UK health website if these aren't disavowed before redirects are setup? If so, on which website should these be done? Thanks!
International SEO | | tah061 -
Is there a Risk Around Creating a Website for Each Country in The World?
Is there a risk around creating a website for each country in the world with similar to identical content depending on the language? We need to serve prices and the local currencies and be compliant with regulations. We're planning to use rel=canonical and HREFLANG tags to help with consolidation and GEO-targeting.
International SEO | | ari_seo0 -
The Website Ahead Contains Malware! - How to deal with this ?
Hello, I got in webmaster tools : The Website Ahead Contains Malware! When i go to the website i cant see the site and im getting a page that saying the same thing, a Malware! problem.
International SEO | | WayneRooney
I search in Google information's about this and its look like someone hack to our website and install something in the code. Is any one have experience with this ?
How can i fix this ? its a very big website.... Need help !!!! Thank you0 -
Rel alternate use for multi regional website with english language and same content
I have a website targeting multi language and multi regional users. For example, my main site is www.abcd.com which is in English and targeting US. I have the same content in English which is targeting UK and India with www.uk.abcd.com and www.india.abcd.com. I want to avoid content duplication and help search engines to show the right pages on the country level searches. I have researched a bit and have come to conclusion of using re alternate tag. Can someone help me with how to place the codes for the same. Many thanks Mozers!
International SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Multi Regional website - Folder strategy
Hello Seomoz people ! I've been struggling for some time now with an international website project. It's gonna be an:international website with joomla. To sum up: We have an international company The company has 13 subsidiaries worldwide (same products, different names) The company doesn't have enough resources to get 13 independent websites Some subsidiaries work in one country / one language, some others on a region (several countries, several languages) Thanks to your community we decided to: Get a main website company.com Get subsidiaries folders (middle east, oceania and south america will be easier to link to their subsidiary) .com/asia .com/middle-east .com/oceania .com/south-america .com/uk .com/usa .com/fr .com/es .com/de .com/ma .com/dz .com/it We also need to: Get some websites in different languages .com/asia-cn .com/asia-en etc. Now how do we do to manage: Regional websites (the first 4th on the upper list) Google allows to affect a website to a country not region Will they compete with the .com ? How do we set up them for google ? How do we avoid duplicate content and keep local ranking .com/asia-en/services1.html will have the exact same content that_.com/services1.html_ If we use canonical from _.com/asia-en/services1.htm_l to _.com/services1.html , d_oes that mean /asia will not rank in asia ? Hope you can help us to figure us the best solution for this good project ! Thanks a lot. Florian
International SEO | | AymanH1 -
Spanglish? Picking keywords for an English website with a Spanish speaking search demographic
I'm putting together meta data for an English website whose target search demographic is the Hispanic market. The website has a Spanish translation as well. When I entered the website into the Google Adwords keyword tool to begin doing keyword research, all keywords returned to me were in Spanish. I am unsure if the meta data keywords I'm preparing for the page should be in Spanish despite the fact that I am preparing the meta data for the English version. Moreover, should there be any mixed Spanish English (Spanglish?) keywords as users might be searching under the English search but in Spanish or with queries that are partially in Spanish?
International SEO | | IMM0 -
Geotargeting two locations using root and /country
Hello, I am in the process of turning my UK targeted website into a global website in multiple languages. I will be using the new HREFLANG tag but I'm wondering about geotargeting. I've set this up in Webmaster Tools as: example.com = UK content
International SEO | | Seaward-Group
example.com/us = US content
example.com/de = German content
example.com/es = Spanish content
example.com/fr = French content
example.com/it = Italian content
example.com/nl = Dutch content Will the root UK content override the following sub directories that are set as a different location because its not /uk? Thank you.0 -
French Canadian Website and French Language URLs
Hello, One of my clients has a question on a new Quebec, Canada version of their website. The website content and copy is in the French Canadian language, but the IT Director has asked if, for the purpose of SEO, should the URLs be in French as well? So, this questions has two parts... For SEO, should the URL's be in French or left in English, to avoid crawl errors? For visitor UX, is there any reason to have them in French versus English?
International SEO | | Aviatech0