Local hosts for sites in foreign countries?
-
Hi everyone. I'm going to be launching localized websites in 5 different european countries (.de, .it. etc).
Must I have a local host with servers in those countries or can I use a U.S. based host? WOuld having a U.S. based host hurt SEO?
-
Hey Steve...your answer completely supports my research today.
From Google:
Geotargeting factors
Google generally uses the following elements to determine the geotargeting of a website (or a part of a website):
- Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
or
Webmaster Tools' manual geotargeting for gTLDs (this can be on a domain, subdomain or subdirectory level); more information on this can be found in our blog post and in the Help Center. With region tags from geotargeting being shown in search results, this method is also very clear to users. Please keep in mind that it generally does not make sense to set a geographic target if the same pages on your site target more than a single country (say, all German-speaking countries) — just write in that language and do not use the geotargeting setting (more on writing in other languages will follow soon!). - Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone.
- Other signals can give us hints. This could be from local addresses & phone numbers on the pages, use of local language and currency, links from other local sites, and/or the use of Google's Local Business Center (where available).
- Use of a ccTLD is generally a strong signal for users since it explicitly specifies a single country in an unmistakable way.
-
This is one of those debates that goes backwards and forwards. Personally I can only go from experience, and to date SEO hasn't been a factor in our server location. We used to host our UK directory in the UK, but the service and technical support from big players was awful, and we had ongoing repeated outages. Reputation and uptime was more important than geographic location, so after a few reccomendations, we moved our hosting to EV1 who were in Texas, they then became Planet, and are now Softlayer. But as much as it pains me to say it, the service in the US has been outstanding, uptime perfect.
3 years later, with Google now considering response times as a signal, we decided our transaction times were too slow. So after 3 wonderful outage free years, moved our UK sites back to the UK. Within 2 weeks, our first outage, 2 months later another very costly outage We have now bitten the bullet and are migrating again to Rackspace and hope their fanatical support lives up to its name. Time will tell...
Between moving backwards and forwards, UK, USA, UK we saw no direct correlation in traffic or rankings.
For Europe, personally I'd find the best European Data Centre you can and host everything out of their for Europe. Theres no need to have a server in France, one in Belgium, one in Germany, UK etc. Our US sites are still based in Texas, but transaction times and SEO is unaffected in North Dakota. If it ever does slow down, then I'd consider another box somewhere in the top half of the US. In Europe, I'd consider the same strategy, let transaction and response times dictate locations.
Agree totally about cultural differences, factor that in and present your content in the local style of the target audience.
-
Thanks so much everyone for the responses so far! Hmm, sounds like it might be what I thought.
However an interesting thing came up yesterday which prompted me to ask the question. One of our partners in Mexico uses a US based host for their website. They said their local host was unreliable.
So I'm thinking either they aren't focusing on SEO or the fact that their site isn't hosted in Mexico doesn't matter.
Thoughts?
-
I agree completely, this will improve both credibility and speed.
From an SEO standpoint, I think each site needs to be written in the native language of the country that your targeting.
I would also suggest doing a little research on the cultures of your target countries.
example: China
Top search engine is not Google, it's Baidu
Facebook isn't accessible from China, they use QQ (600+ million subscribers)
Youtube isn't accessible from China, not sure what they use.
Adult sites are completely illegal in China
Don't comment about political issues, no such thing as free speech.I'm sure other countries aren't as drastic as China, but the local cultures, trends, and laws will all differ from yours.
-
Perhaps its superstition, but most site owners that I know prefer to host sites in the region of their TLD. It seems that this could be a trust factor from Google.
-
We are a US based company, but also do a lot of business in many other countries. Though most of our customers are in the states, many of our vendors are abroad. Our vendors need access to our website too. During a trip a few months ago, one of our vendors commented that our website took over 5 minutes to load.
I did some searching and found that putting our site on a Content Delivery Network (CDN) would solve this problem. We ended up using www.cloudflare.com for this. Basically, they put your content on different servers around the world and serve it up from the server that's closest to your visitor.
I tested our website during my last visit and the difference was AMAZING! Cloud flare also speeds up your website, but that's a different conversation. There was a little technical learning involved and a glitch here and there. Overall, I'm pretty happy with Cloudflare. BTW, you will still need to host your sites somewhere, Cloudflare is not a host.
Their basic service is free and they have a Pro version for $20.00 per month. I have the pro service, but could get by with the basic service if we were on a tight budget. I find the pro version is worth the extra 20 bucks.
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
-
Site Redesign - Inbound Links
Hello all. What would be some of the best practices or good resources on site redesign while maintaining inbound links? We would hate to have the natural, organic links to the site we have generated over the past 3 years to all of a sudden become broken. The domain is not changing but the URL structure very well may. For example, www.domain dot com/blog/postabouttopic which has many inbound links may move to www.domain dot com/news/blog/postabouttopic Is it a matter of simply using 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages? Is there any issues to be aware of when having hundreds of 301 redirects? Is there a best practice? A good site that explains this in detail? Thank you for your time! Have a great day!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | S2RSolutions0 -
Duplicate content across hundreds of Local sites and they all rank #1
Usually when we discuss duplicate content, we're addressing the topic of penalties or non-indexing. In this case, we're discussing ranking high with duplicate content. I've seen lots of dental, chiropractor and veterinarian sites built by companies that give them cookie cutter sites with the same copy. And they all rank #1 or #2. Here are two companies that do that:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katandmouse
http://www.rampsites.com/rampsites/home_standard.asp?sectionid=4
http://mysocialpractice.com/about/ The later uses external blogs to provide inbound links to their clients' site, but not all services do that, in fact, this is the first time I've seen them with external blogs. Usually the blog with duplicate copy is ON SITE and the sites still rank #1. Query "Why Your Smile Prefers Water Over Soft Drinks" to see duplicate content on external blogs. Or "Remember the Mad Hatter from the childhood classic, Alice in Wonderland? Back then, the process of making hats involved using mercury compounds. Overexposure could produce symptoms referred to as being" for duplicate content on chiropractor sites that rank high. I've seen well optimized sites rank under them even though their sites have just as much quality content and it's all original with more engagement and inbound links. It appears to me that Google is turning a blind eye on duplicate content. Maybe because these are local businesses with local clientele it doesn't care that a chiropractor in NY has the same content as one in CA, just as the visitor doesn't care because the visitor in CA isn't look at a chiropractor's site in NY generally. So maybe geo-targeting the site has something to do with it. As a test, I should take the same copy and put it on a non-geo-targeted site and see if it will get indexed. I asked another Local SEO expert if she has run across this, probably the best in my opinion. She has and she finds it difficult to rank above them as well. It's almost as if Google is favoring those sites. So the question is, should all dentists, chiropractors and veterinarians give it up to these services? I shudder to think that, but, hey it's working and it's a whole lot less work - and maybe expense - for them.0 -
More Indexed Pages than URLs on site.
According to webmaster tools, the number of pages indexed by Google on my site doubled yesterday (gone from 150K to 450K). Usually I would be jumping for joy but now I have more indexed pages than actual pages on my site. I have checked for duplicate URLs pointing to the same product page but can't see any, pagination in category pages doesn't seem to be indexed nor does parameterisation in URLs from advanced filtration. Using the site: operator we get a different result on google.com (450K) to google.co.uk (150K). Anyone got any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidLenehan0 -
How can I rank a national site for local terms
Hi All I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on. In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful. Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Our quilting site was hit by Panda/Penguin...should we start a second "traffic" site?
I built a website for my wife who is a quilter called LearnHowToMakeQuilts.com. However, it has been hit by Panda or Penguin (I’m not quite sure) and am scared to tell her to go ahead and keep building the site up. She really wants to post on her blog on Learnhowtomakequilts.com, but I’m afraid it will be in vain for Google’s search engine. Yahoo and Bing still rank well. I don’t want her to produce good content that will never rank well if the whole site is penalized in some way. I’ve overly optimized in linking strongly to the keywords “how to make a quilt” for our main keyword, mainly to the home page and I think that is one of the main reasons we are incurring some kind of penalty. First main question: From looking at the attached Google Analytics image, does anyone know if it was Panda or Penguin that we were “hit” by? And, what can be done about it? (We originally wanted to build a nice content website, but were lured in by a get rich quick personality to rather make a “squeeze page” for the Home page and force all your people through that page to get to the really good content. Thus, our avenge time on site per person is terrible and Pages per Visit is low at: 1.2. We really want to try to improve it some day. She has a local business website, Customcarequilts.com that did not get hit. Second question: Should we start a second site rather than invest the time in trying to repair the damage from my bad link building and article marketing? We do need to keep the site up and running because it has her online quilting course for beginner quilters to learn how to quilt their first quilt. We host the videos through Amazon S3 and were selling at least one course every other day. But now that the Google drop has hit, we are lucky to sell one quilting course per month. So, if we start a second site we can use that to build as a big content site that we can use to introduce people to learnhowtomakequilts.com that has Martha’s quilting course. So, should we go ahead and start a new fresh site rather than to repair the damage done by my bad over optimizing? (We’ve already picked out a great website name that would work really well with her personal facebook page.) Or, here’s a second option, which is to use her local business website: customcarequilts.com. She created it in 2003 and has had it ever since. It is only PR 1. Would this be an option? Anyway I’m looking for guidance on whether we should pursue repairing the damage and whether we should start a second fresh site or use an existing site to create new content (for getting new quilters to eventually purchase her course). Brad & Martha Novacek rnUXcWd
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BradNovi0 -
Redirection to mobile site
Calling all SEO ninjas! I'm currently developing single web pages for various clients which function as abbreviated versions of their main websites. They are all related & under a single domain. When a user visits these pages on a mobile device, CSS is used to display mobile friendly versions of these pages. My clients are thrilled with these mobile versions and now want to also redirect mobile visitors from their main site (which is not mobile optimised) to these pages. My questions are: Are there any negative implications if we did this? ie. redirecting to a different domain What is the best method for redirection? eg. JavaScript Can this be achieved by adding a single line of code to their main site Can this be done in an SEO friendly way so that the redirection acts like a backlink? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | martyc0 -
Site #2 beats site #1 in every aspect?
Hey guys, loving SEOMoz so far and will definitely continue my subscription after the free trial. I have a question however, which I am really confused about. When researching my primary keyword, I have found that the second ranked site beats the top site in every single aspect, apart from domain age, which is almost 6 years for the top one and 6 months for the second. When I say every single aspect, I mean everything. More authority for the page and domain, more links, more anchor text links, more authoritive links, more social signals, more relevant links, better domain (although second ranked site is a .net), better MozRank, better MozTrust etc.... I have noticed though, that in the UK SERPs, those sites are switched, so #2 is actually #1. Could it be that the US SERPs just haven't updated yet, or am I missing something completely different.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darrenspeed1 -
My Job Site is having Indexing Issues
I have 2 job sites that I am managing and working on. One of the sites has a great deal of job vacancies and expired job pages that have been indexed. This one below: http:// job search.cctc .com/cctc Jobsearch/expandedjobsearch.do This job site does not have any job pages index: http://www.cross countryallied. com/ctAlliedWebSite/ travel-nurse-jobs/job-search.jsp Why and what can I do to get the dynamic pages index and ranking? Any help tips would be much appreciated. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia0