Does Hosting location impact on local search results?
-
Hi,
long time user first time questioner : )
I'm wondering if using a server overseas impacts on local search results?
I heard something to this effect and I thought I would come to the guys that know!
Thank for your help,
Ben.
-
Ha ha love it!
Your site's domain is currently associated with the target: Australia..
automatic for .com.au then?
Thanks Robert!
-
Go to GWMT and in home page select the site you want.
Select Configuration
Select Settings
To right you will see: Target users in......... Brisbane mate. (not really, but it would be funny)
Hope it helps,
-
For the life of me I can't find where to update those details in GWMT, can anybody please help me there?
-
Good advice, thank you!
-
I have a server with SSD drives myself...love it! But even if you cannot find such a configuration in your country you can consider using Amazon's AWS or a similar service for cloud hosting.
-
That's so helpful mate, thank you!
-
As to changing servers just for rankings, I would not personally unless it was an easy switch for you. Remember, with what I detailed, you should be fine to rank in Brisbane following those steps.
Best -
Thank you Ryan, that was very helpful.
I have always enjoyed good rankings doing the same simple, trusted stuff.. the allure of ssd drives sent me to the states but the site is not doings anything locally... Time to rethink me thinks!
-
I agree with everything Robert shared and would suggest you watch the following short videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXt23AXlJJU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keIzr3eWK8I
Keep in mind those videos are from 2009. With that said, I would suggest the server's location is one of numerous signals Google uses to determine relevancy.
-
Thanks for the zippy answer Robert!
To refine my question, I'm in Brisbane Australia, and my server is in the states... does it matter?
Is it worth me getting a server locally with rankings as the ultimate motivation?
Thank you,
Ben.
-
Ian,
Assuming you are hosting in Europe on a generic TLD, and you want to rank in Houston for Auto Body Repair, you will need to go into GWMT and set your location. You will need to set language as en-us.
On your pages you will need to insure that you show a Houston address and make the content Houston relevant.
A suggestion is to include Google Map code showing location of Houston business.
Also, it is imperative for local ranking to have your Google + for business verified.
I hope this helps,
Robert
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
-
My indexed site URL removed from google search without get any message or Manual Actions??
On Agust 2 or 3.. I'm not sure about the exact date...
International SEO | | newwaves
The main URL of my website https://new-waves.net/ had been completely removed from Google search results! without getting any messages or Manual Actions on search console ?? but I'm still can find some of my site subpages in search results and on Google local maps results when I tried to check it on google
info:new-waves.net >> no results
site:new-waves.net >> only now I can see the main URL in results because I had submitted it again and again to google but it might be deleted again today or tomorrow as that happen before last few days
100% of all ranked keywords >> my site URL new-waves.net had been completely removed from all results! but I'm still can see it on maps on some results My site was ranked number 1 on google search results for "digital marketing qatar" and some other keywords, but the main URL had been removed from 100% of all search results. but you can still see it on the map only. I just tried to submit it again to Google and to index it through google search console tool but still not get any results, Can any one help to know what is the reason?? and how can I solve this issue without losing my previous ranked keywords? Can I submit a direct message to google support or customer service to know the reason or get help on this issue? Thanks & Regards0 -
GSC is not showing URLs in Regional Language Characters in Search Analytics
Hi, We have a regional language sub-domain, which has the URI in the regional language characters (Hindi). While looking at the Search Analytics data in GSC, we get all the URLs in ASCII format. To resolve this issue, we even encoded the characters in UTF-8, by adding the following in the of the page: However, we are still getting illegible URLs in search console. It would be really great if someone could help me out with this issue. Thanks!
International SEO | | Starcom_Search0 -
Multi-Country Hosting
Hi all
International SEO | | yousayjump
I have read a few post that are similar to mine on this forum but still wanted to ask my specific question. We have a .com domain hosted on a dedicated server in the UK for our main website which takes online bookings and payments. We have purchased the following TLD's of our domain name:
.it, .es, .ch, .fr, .es, .at We essentially want to create a satellite site on each domain where the idea is that users in those countries will find our satellite sites via organic search engine results when searching for the information we sell. Due to the nature of our infrastructure, each satellite site will connect to the mysql database on the UK site to drawn down its text content. This is where the main CMS is located. I understand the following are important from an SEO point of view for our satellite sites: Hosting in the country we wish to target
Geographical targeting via WMT
Local addresses and telephone numbers on the site
Correct lang=" " tag in the source code
Content presented in the correct language (goes without saying really) Can you advise on any other considerations? Many Thanks Kris0 -
Alternate tag. Anybody had success getting English websites only with localized currency served with alternate tag?
I have an English website with USD prices and US phone.
International SEO | | lcourse
Via currency dropdown visitors in Ireland can choose EUR as currency, visitors from Denmark Danish crown etc and via GEO IP I also serve local contact phone numbers. So I though it made sense to define this with the alternate tags, but now after several months google still does not pickup these pages in local searches. Did anybody have success with getting a website just with currency parameter ranked locally using the alternate tag? Does it help to have also static links (not only dropdown links) to currency versions on the page? Any other thing that could help to have google pick these up? Below my code sample:0 -
Is Seo Effected by Switching Hosting Services?
I currently own a domain that is hosting by yahoo! However, they have no blog and they are not "responsive" to smart and mobile phones. I am looking to go from Yahoo! Hosting to maybe hostagor and looking to go from static to CMS for seo purposes. My fear is of loosing SERP's as I do rank good for some majotr local keywords. Any opinions? James
International SEO | | jimmy02250 -
Geo targeting issue and hosting
Hi guys and gals, this is not a problem per se, but an oddity that I would appreciate some insight on from the big juicy brains in this community. Our site had hosting in the US, and I was concerned that therefore our relevance to our own country (Australia) was diminished because of it. For one of our main keywords we were a few spots behind the competitor on the 1st page for an australian searcher, but when i searched the same keyword from Google.com with gl=us to show US only results, we outranked the competitors by a few spots. On page elements aside (if anything we had more geo identifiers on the ranking page in question) I wanted to move hosts anyway and got hosting in Australia. The next week our search traffic jumped by 25%. But it was almost all US traffic. Australian traffic was unchanged. Any idea how this could happen? It's an .AU domain, hosted in Australia, with on page clearly identifying Australia. I checked webmaster tools and our geo is properly set to Australia. I checked the keywords that the traffic increased for and they are not geo specific at all. Besides that I don't know how else to pin this down. Thanks.
International SEO | | Digital3600 -
How to replace my .co.uk site with my .com site in the US Google results
My customer and I are based in the UK. My customer's site, www.blindbolt.co.uk has been around for years. Last year we launched their American site, www.blindboltusa.com. Searching on google.com (tested both via proxy and using the gl=us querystring trick), a search for blind bolt on the US Google returns our www.blindbolt.co.uk site. We would like it to show our www.blindboltusa.com website in US searches. Webmaster tools has the Geographic Target set correctly for each site. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions please? Thanks.
International SEO | | OffSightIT0 -
Ranking local content against English content
Hi SEOMoz, If I have a site that has multiple language selection, how would it be possible for my site with localized content to rank higher than the default/English content? For example, in Google.co.th, my site with English content (http://www.xyz.com/en-us/) ranks higher than the localized content (http://www.xyz.com/th-th/). How is it possible for me to turn things around and ensure that for local markets like Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, China etc the localized content organically ranks higher than the default-English page? Thanks! Steve
International SEO | | sjcbayona-412180