If Google doesn’t know we’re hosted in the UK, does that affect our SERPs?

[OptiBacUK]

Hi,

In November 2011 our eCommerce website dropped from between 3rd and 4th position in the UK SERPs down to 7th and 8th. A year after this happened, we still haven’t moved back up to the original ranking despite all our best efforts and we’re looking for a bit of insight into what could have happened.  One of our theories is this, do you think it might be the problem?

In October 2011 we moved from a single-site custom built CMS hosted in the UK to a multi-site custom built CMS hosted on a much better server based in the UK. As part of this move we started using CloudFlare to help with security and performance (CloudFlare is a security CDN).  Because CloudFlare’s servers are in the US, to the outside world it almost looks like we went from a slow hosting company in the UK to a much quicker hosting company in the US.

Could this have affected our rankings? We know that Google takes the server IP address into account as a ranking factor, but as far as we understand it’s because they (rightly) believe that a server closer to the user will perform better. So a UK server will serve up pages quicker to a visitor in the UK than a US server because the data has a shorter distance to travel.

However, we’re definitely not experiencing an issue with being recognised as a UK website. We have a .co.uk domain (which is obviously a big indicator) and if you click on “Pages from the UK” in the SERPs we jump up to 3rd place. So Google seems to know we’re a UK site.

Is the fact we’re using CloudFlare and hence hiding our real server IP address – is this penalising us in the SERPs?

Currently out of the 6 websites above us, 4 are in the US and 2 are in the UK. All of these are massive sites with lots of links, so smaller ranking factors might be more important for us. Obviously the big downside of not using CloudFlare is that our site becomes much less secure and it becomes much slower. Images and some static content is distributed via a local CloudFlare server, which means it should tick Google’s box in terms of providing a quick site for users.

CloudFlare say in a blog post that they used to have Google crawl rates and geo-tagging issues in the past when they were just starting out, but in 2010 they started working with “the big search engines” to make sure they treated CloudFlare like a CDN (so special rules that apply to Akamai also apply to CloudFlare). Since they’ve been working with Google, CloudFlare say that their customers will only see a positive SEO impact.

So at the moment we’re at a loss about what happened to our ranking. Google say they take IP’s into account for ranking, but by using CloudFlare it looks like we’re in the US. We definitely know we’re not having geo-tagging issues and CloudFlare say they’re working with Google to ensure its customers aren't seeing a negative impact by using CloudFlare, but a niggling part of us still wonders whether it could impact our SEO.

Many thanks, James

[OptiBacUK]

Hi Des,   Thanks, I didn’t know that’s why we were assigned a “special crawl rate” in WMT.   Could the special crawl affect our ranking? For example Google puts a lot of weight on freshness, so if Google is crawling us less (we can’t tell if it’s more or less than before), could this make our site look less fresh?   We have really tried our best to rule out all other possibilities. Our content is much better and more frequent than it was before and our link building is natural and gradual. We’ve also looked at over optimisation and our competitors. Our competitors are Wikipedia, a couple of national UK newspapers, Harvard, a medical encyclopaedia and a single American competitor. We’re the first UK company to appear the in the SERPs. Whilst these are obviously very big companies, none of them (with the exception of the American company) targets the keyword as much as our website does.   Incidentally we did come back up to 4th yesterday but we’ve already a dropped a place today so it doesn’t look like it’ll last.   The other thing we found really strange is that the singular version of our keyword didn’t drop at all and has stayed very stable; it’s just in the plural keyword that we dropped. The vast majority of our anchor text is using the plural version (it’s in our brand name) and the domain also contains the plural version. Was there an algorithm change around that time, or maybe are we over optimising the plural keyword? (Is that even possible?)   Thanks James

[OptiBacUK]

Hi SEO5, Thanks for your response. I had come across that forum post before, which incidentally led me to CloudFlare's article about how they work with Google. Maybe I wasn't being explicit enough in my question. We definitely know that Google prefers a faster website and that they have special rules for CDN's. So just to clarify, we were just wondering if there is any way that could using CloudFlare (and therefore not making it clear we’re hosted in the UK) negatively affect our rankings? We’re specifically looking at the UK SERPs ,rather than the US SERPs. Also could you clarify with what you mean with server change? The new server is faster and more reliable, but are there other factors than server speed and server location that Google take into account? We’ve also looked at over optimisation and our competitors. Our competitors are Wikipedia, a couple of national UK newspapers, Harvard and a medical encyclopaedia and a single American competitor. We’re the first UK company to appear the in the SERPs. Whilst these are obviously very big companies, none of them (with the exception of the American company) targetx the keyword as much as our website does. Thanks, James

[dmccarthy]

1. Cloud flare is a distributed service with edge servers in many countries around the world. These servers will send your website content from the edge. Users in the uk will most likely be served from a uk server. 2. Google is well clued up on cloud flare and will as you said know that it is dealing with a cdn. Hence in webmaster tools you will not be able to adjust the google crawl rate. 3. In google webmaster tools you can set your desire location, tld that you are targeting. In your case .co.uk. This will tell google I am interested in .co.uk based queries. 4. You should not rule out other possibilities. As sherlock says "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? "

[SEO5Team]

Hi James,

The loss of ranking could be attributed to various factors:

• Over optimization penalty
• The changing of the servers
• Competitors outranking you with more quality and aggressive SEO

If you do have a co.uk domain then the changing of hosting from the US to UK could have impacted the rankings.

Here's a link to a discussion on Cloud fare's impact on SEO.