Implications of hosting country versus actual trading country?
-
Unbeknown to me our web developers have hosted our UK e-commerce site (and only serving the UK & outer islands) on a US based server. Can this impact our SEO efforts? My further concern is when it comes to sending out emails and opt-in regulations - I am right to be concerned about this as well?
Thanks -
Hi Andy - I wish I could move away from them, but seem to be locked in. Yes, there are databases involved. Thank you. I am now looking into hosting in the UK. You live and learn - but sometimes at a price. Thanks again.
-
Thank you Gary - another interesting factor which I appreciate. Just goes to show you have to ensure that every I is dotted when dealing with developers - especially when they claim to be experts!! Coupled with other emerging errors this has been costly in terms of time etc.
-
Aside from problems to do with the geo-location of the IP, hosting on US servers instead of UK servers will have a page load performance hit on your site, which in theory could affect your sites rankings.
I host half of my UK sites on Germany based servers, and the other half on UK servers, and I notice no real difference.
-
It sounds to me like you need to move away from them ASAP! Is the site a static HTML site or are there databases involved as well? In bringing the site back, you need to make sure that everything comes back over and the transition is not messed up for you.
-
Thank you MaryAnne - I was pretty sure that this was the case so as yet have not implemented an e-marketing campaign. For a variety of reasons I had assumed it was hosted in the UK so was pretty shocked to find it wasn't.
-
Thank you Andy - I had believed this to be the case so that is great to have it confirmed. In migrating it to UK servers is there anything I should be aware of. The company involved have done other things that have caused me all sorts of problems.
-
Thank you for confirming Peter's comments - confirmation always gives strength of resolve. The target customers are the UK.
-
Thank you Peter for your helpful and prompt reply - this has worried me a lot and you only confirm my fears. (What makes it worse is that it is for a client). In migrating to a UK server are there any things I should be aware of.
-
To address the other half of your question: I'm quite certain that if your site is hosted in the US and your host were to receive a spam complaint, they'd be obligated to address it according to the laws of their jurisdiction, which means you would have to abide by the US CAN-SPAM regulations. I'd definitely run this by your company's legal counsel to be on the safe side.
-
Google uses the IP of the server hosting the site as one way of delivering that content to the correct target areas. So in short, yes, this is a problem and one that you need to resolve.
It is an SEO tactic that is used if you are country specific and want to target other locations.
Regards,
Andy
-
I agree with peterm22, but I'd also wanna know where are your targeted customers?
-
In short, Yes it can have an effect on your SEO. You may find it more difficult to show up on google.co.uk, even if you have a .co.uk domain name if you use a US host!
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
-
Why is the Dev site indexing and not my actual Domain
hi guys I had 2 word press sites built but since they went live a couple of things aren't working. 1.when I do a keyword search one of the sites comes back with the actual URL and when I do another keyword search for the same site the DEV site comes back indexed and not the actual URL. 2. The other site originally started indexing with the DEV site and not the URL and the developer tried to fix it and now it doesn't index at all. Its been long enough time for it to index. Both URL's are live when put into a browser. Any advice would be great Thanks Jamie
Technical SEO | | HLAS0 -
Geographic location of hosting affect SEO
Can anyone confirm if its the geographic location of the web hosting or the domain hosting that can affect seo ? I have a client who has their domain hosting and Website hosting in Australia however their they have a .co.nz and their target market is in New Zealand. thank you
Technical SEO | | summer3000 -
To avoid errors in our Moz crawl, we removed subdomains from our host. (First we tried 301 redirects, also listed as errors.) Now we have backlinks all over the web that are broken. How bad is this, from a pagerank standpoint?
Our MOZ crawl kept telling us we had duplicate page content even though our subdomains were redirected to our main site. (Pages from Wineracks.vigilantinc.com were 301 redirected to vigilantinc.com/wineracks.) Now, to solve that problem, we have removed the wineracks.vigilantinc.com subdomain. The error report is better, but now we have broken backlinks - thousands of them. Is this hurting us worse than the duplicate content problem?
Technical SEO | | KristyFord0 -
Using same IP for differenct country TLD versions
Hi Will having a websites in several languages hosted on the same IP be a problem SEO wise if they are using different country TLD's? In this case shopdomain.de, at and co.uk on the exact same server IP
Technical SEO | | AndersDK0 -
How do you know when to upgrade hosting to VPS or Dedicated Server from an SEO perspective?
From an SEO perspective, how do you know when to upgrade web hosting to VPS or Dedicated Server? Added: We have a Dedicated IP Address and plenty of bandwidth and disk space. We've done a lot of work on page speed. What we don't need is slow-downs due to the sharing space. Our business is seasonal with much higher traffic for three months of the year. I'm leaning towards moving it up a notch. What is the next level after this? And yes, our web host just confirmed that some of the things I want to implement can't be done because we are on a shared server. He recommended going to Dedicated Hosting. And finally: If we want to be absolutely positive that shared hosting problems won't affect us, and to customize, and also to increase speed, dedicated server seems to be the way to go?
Technical SEO | | zharriet0 -
What are the SEO implications of using Interstitials?
Hi, I want to implement an interstitial similar to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/defaultinterstitial.cms. Within few seconds it gets redirected to http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/. What are the SEO implications of having this sort of arrangement? Regards
Technical SEO | | IM_Learner0 -
A client will be translating their entire site into French in addition to English. For SEO purposes, should I host it on the same domain or create its own dedicated domain?
The current site is a long-standing site with good authority and a good number of links. Thanks....
Technical SEO | | JamesBSEO0 -
When moving my ecommerce website from one host to another should I also 301 all my image urls?
I'm going to be 301'ing a lot of pages, but should i also 301 my image URLS? Any other helpful hints would be awesome too, as this will be my first move online ever. We've been with our host 3 years. Thanks! Paul Serra STbands.com, Owner
Technical SEO | | Hyrule0