Server Location & SEO

[jesse-landry]

So I just read an interesting Tweet:

#SEO Tip: #Google takes into account the location of the server (the IP) when projecting the search results #web

This is something I had not thought of. I suppose my question then is HOW does it factor this information into it's results?

For some reason, one of our sites is hosted on a Canadian server. We are a cloud hosting company and we serve all of NA with data centers in the US and Canada... For whatever reason we've used the Canadian server farm for our web server.

Could this possibly be hurting our NA google SERPs?

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

[gfiorelli1]

Actually, Google position is this:

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.

(cited from here).

So, where the hosting is not relevant, or so relevant as it could be once.

Said that, the IP has a weight, hence you can always associate a IP of your targeted country to your site, even if you are hosting it in your own server (in another country than the targeted one).

Finally, as said by the others, Google looks up at the users IP in order to present what it could be the most useful for him (geo-targeting personalization).

[jesse-landry]

@ Christopher -

Excellent advice and I've thought about doing something like this for awhile now. I've been told conflicting things about those .ca addresses. Some say it matters, some say it matters not. We do already own the .ca of our domain and so far it's not pointed to anything... Do I just point it to our server and canonical it or develop a new site geared towards Canadians? As it stands, we have a few pages with Canadian specific content that are ranking well on Google and driving in traffic.

@Supple... It sounds like what you're saying is exactly how I interpreted the Tweet.. Google displays personalized results and factors IP address into that query, sure. So then it does matter that our server lives in Canada, while the majority of our business comes from the US? This, I guess, is my main concern. Thing is, I'm not too worried about it because we get a TON of U.S. traffic and are ranking incredibly well for our target keywords and only improving each week.

Just curious about how this all works.

Thanks for all the input guys, very helpful. Love this community.

[enjoiart]

From my personal experience, it's negligible at least within the United States. It can be easily offset by other ranking factors. I think the site getting served up to the area faster would play more of a role more so than localization of the providing server. With so many companies outsourcing their servers to other areas. It would be a bad way to determine location. Country borders may play a larger role. My recommendation move the .com to the US. Buy a .ca host it in Canada, serve up your content with a cdn and get your content translated to canadian french and run both markets!

[JerryCrockford]

I'm a developer / seo from Australia and we've found this is correct.

A lot of cheaper hosting companies are obviously in the US and even though they're cheap we've been progressively moving over clients to our servers here for better results.  I haven't tested it thoroughly, but I would think even moving a specific site to it's closest location would effect SERP results.  Meaning if you were looking for dry cleaning in Washington, you might find it helpful to get a Washington based hosting company.  Then, when google crawls your site, it will find the information on a nearby server and this might even make the site slightly faster in terms of response times for requests and this would effect results (even only minutely).

Having said that, like everything in SEO it's just one of the hundreds of factors involved.  Moving your site nearby won't fix everything automatically...but it's something that can be easily changed for a relatively small fee.