Physical locationof the server vs customer base vs SEO penality?

[sbcinv]

HI All,

We are an Australian business with our hosting currently based in Australia.

We have recently been considering moving hosts for a few reasons.  In particular when we have done analysis of hosting in the US and also with Rackspace say in Hong Kong we have found that the prices can be significantly cheaper or with more bells in whistles provided in the hosting of a dedicated server offshore vs Australia for the same price.

Therefore from this point of view we would be much better off moving our hosting to the US or HK with Rackspace.

There are the issues such as latency to take on board but lets put that to the side for the moment as we are mostly interested in understanding if offshore hosting will impact us from an SEO perspective and if so how and can these impacts be mitigated.

So our first question is

a) if we move our hosting offshore, will this impact our SEO?

b) if it does impact our seo, how will it impact (ie lose rankings for organic pages due to IP address being offshore)?

c) is A is also an impact are there ways of eliminating these impacts outlined in B?

d) net - if the impacts on seo can be mitigated will the net result still be negative or could we still be seen on the same footing as a domain hosted in Australia?

Thanks

Sean

[ICTADVIS]

Hi Everyone

I am maybe going to throw a spanner in the works here, but here goes.

I have read what you are all considering. I have been in the position whereby I have been asked on occasions to look at an ecommerce website that was not performing too well. I might find it has been registered for a number of years and it sat on a .co.uk domain had a few decent backlinks yet just wasn't cutting it with Google.co.uk

Investigation on these occasions showed the site to be hosted on a server in the USA, but my .co.uk ecommerce client really wanted to see some decent traffic from the UK.

I have then gone through the process of moving the domain onto a UK based server and after a short time boomph the website improved its performance on all round. Now had I done this only once you might say that was a fluke, but I have carried out this exercise on many occasions now where in most cases i was faced with the above scenario.

I had a client site for example that had some really good links some coming from one of our top television websites that had great pagerank, but it was not along with other good links rubbing of on this clients site. I oved the site domain from Germany back into the UK and again BOOMPH the website performance improved.

And in some cases where I was then faced with having to achieve the opposite i.e. have my UK client site reach say an audience in Germany, I would then use the Google products available to me for GEO targetting and also would create a page on www.clientdomain.com/german rather than doing as some suggest which is http://german.clientdomain.com

I agree with eyepac that conten links and good old fashioned optimisation are key factors for pages to do well and I would go as far as saying that my recipe for a bit of formality in how you prioritise your header code and then your approach to on-the-page content layout is still important. And a wee visit every now and then to remind ourselves of the Google Guide Line document that is available to us is always worth revising.

Look forward to anyone's feedback

[eyepaq]

Hi,

Does it matter from an SEO point of view if I use domainname.com or domainname.com.au?

** Yes, there is an impact but small. If all other things are equal then Google will favor the specific country TLD but I would't focus that much on it unless you are in the stage to choose a domain. I have several samples here in Austria with domains dot com that are killing the competitors as far as rankings, competitors that use dot at and that is because they have a better site vs the competition ( content, optimisation, links etc)

But again, like you said users also might favor .co.au as far as CTR. I know for a fact in France, Germany, Austria and italy that this is a big issue as users really tend to click on country TLDs way more.

Further does the registration address (i.e. whois data) matter.  For example we are Australian based but our domain registration address is in the US

** No, that's not something that Google is getting into account. A lot of companies have the whois registration private for example. You can be in us, business ca be registered from us and provide info, products that are good, info that deserved to be ranked well in Australia so the whois info is irrelevant from a user point of view.

[sbcinv]

Thanks guys for your feedback.  Another dimension to this.

If I am an Australian business targeting Australian customers but host offshore.  Does it matter from an SEO point of view if I use domainname.com or domainname.com.au?  I understand it may impact what the customer thinks but I am more interested in it from an SEO perspective and if the domain extension is important.

Further does the registration address (i.e. whois data) matter.  For example we are Australian based but our domain registration address is in the US.

I assume these are all subtle things but I am interested to understand if they have an impact on SEO.

Thanks

[eyepaq]

a) if we move our hosting offshore, will this impact our SEO?

** It dosen't matter anymore as long as quality is the same or better.

b) if it does impact our seo, how will it impact (ie lose rankings for organic pages due to IP address being offshore)?

** In the past it was a very slight influence on Geo serps. Google.com vs google.co.au differences based on GEO ip locations (you can find several tests done in the seo sector online on the subject - however there is no longer the case).

I know several companies - big and small that host with Amazon Irland and they focus on very far regions.

I also know some US based, with US focus that hosts on Amazon Irland Cloud (due to some apps also hosted there for EU markets and there are no issues from an SEO point of view.

[KevinBudzynski]

I don't believe the geo location of the ip address will matter much anymore (we have a high-ranking site with an ip address in Germany). I think the larger issues may be tied in with how fast the server is and the frequency of change of the ip address tied to the site (so if the ip address changes a ton). Even if it is a seo factor today, I would not expect it to be weighed heavily.

Would be interested in hearing different opinions/experience with this though.