Changing server location for a global targetted site
-
Hi,
I am just in the process of purchasing a site from someone. The site has a global target audience (well global English speaking anyway).
The site is on a .info domain and is currently hosted in Germany.
Checking on SemRush it looks like 70% of traffic comes from English speaking countries (US, Australia, Canada, UK).
Now I need to move the hosting to one of my own when I change ownership of the site. Now does it overly matter where I choose my hosting as currently it is hosted in Germany (around 4% of visitors from Germany) but I want to do my best not to knock any rankings but I was thinking of moving it to a UK or US based host but still want to keep a general worldwide userbase. As the US accounts for the largest part of traffic (39%) would I be best choosing hosting based over in the US or does it not overly matter too much (I am in the UK so most hosting I use is UK based).
I have read a number of posts on server location but most seem to be for site which have a country specific target audience.
Thanks for your help!
-
Thanks for the reply Theo
In my mind it made sence that I should be able to move host to a different country with not too many problems. Most of my other sites are UK based with a UK target audience I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't be rocking the boat too much with a change of country and had it been hosted in a country where there was a decent level of traffic coming from then I'd have not considered thinking of moving it, the German hosting just threw me a curve ball I wanted to make sure I didn't ruin anything.
A fast US or UK server does sound like it would be OK to switch to. With regards to a CDN solution, there are no images or such on the site and the pages are very small file sizes so I'm unsure that it would make too much different to the load times, however a very good suggestion and once I get ownership of the site I'll check that that is still the case.
With regards to the .info domain, I know it's not ideal but the site I am buying is around 6 years old so I'm just going to have to live with it for this site, had it only been a year or 2 old I'd have given it a bit more thought.
-
You should be looking at this from two different angles: (1) how would the hosting affect your rankings and (2) how will it affect the loading time of your website.
In terms of rankings, especially since you're considering to purchase a .info domain (side note: are you sure about this? Domains with .info isn't exactly considered a super premium TLD), I don't think it'll make much of a difference whether you'll be hosting in the USA or in Germany. Had it been a .de targeting Germany (much like the articles you're referencing) things had been different and I would've advised you to keep hosting the website in Germany.
Add the fact that it seems that fewer than 5% of your visitors are coming from Germany in the first place, I would say a move to an IP located in the US wouldn't hurt your number of visitors. Perhaps it might even increase your rankings in the USA marginally because Google now finds your IP hosted over there.
In terms of loading time you might want to consider CDN solutions to serve your website as quickly as possible to a global crowd.
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
-
International Targeting for Australia Problem
Hello Moz Community! I'm reaching out since I recently launched a UK and Australia version of my website. Now, each page on the website has 4 versions: 1. www.example.com 2. www.example.com/au 3. www.example.com/uk 4. www.example.com/en <-- this is a by-product of the plugin we're using, CMS is WP each page has the following 4 targeting tags on it: I looked in Webmaster Tools and we're getting an error on what appears to be every Australia page. The error states, ""au"- unknown language code. URLs for your site that have an unknown language code 'au' and their alternate URLs." In Google's own example, they have the language for Australia set as en-au [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en} Has anyone run into this issue before? We had the alternate tag set to "au" at first, but edited the plugin so the alternate tag now says "en-au", but this still hasn't remedied the problem. Any insights into resolving this error are greatly appreciated!
International SEO | | DigitalThirdCoast0 -
Which will rank higher: Non-mobile friendly site in native language vs. mobile friendly global site in English?
Hi, we are currently implementing a mobile site, e.g. m.company.com. The global mobile site will only be available in English. We have local subsites of the desktop site, e.g. company.com/fr. The local subsites are not mobile friendly. If a user does a search for a brand term in France, **which site will rank higher in SERPs? **If it will be the global site, is there anything we can do (other than making them mobile friendly) to make the local sites rank higher? Would it be the mobile-friendly site, even though it is only in English, because the local site would be penalized for not being mobile friendly? Or would it be the local site, because Google will give priority to the fact that it's in French, which matches the language of the person searching?
International SEO | | jennifer.new0 -
Setting up a website targeted for the US
Hi, As an English company we have a co.uk domain with .com domain pointing to this. We are now looking to launch a separate (new) website targeting the American market and I have been asked to do the following: If an American or Canadian IP address visits the .com website it automatically goes to our newly created website i.e. website 2. If a non-American or non-Canadian IP address goes to .com it automatically goes to the original website i.e. website 1. If a user is on website 1 and clicks an American flag it takes the website user to website 2. If a user is on website 2 and clicks on the UK flag it takes the website user to website 1. Can anyone advise the best way to go about doing this as I feel that this could effect our search rankings. I am concerned how the search engines will penalize website 2 (original site) which has good rankings. Thanks in advance.
International SEO | | Cybertill0 -
International Sites - Sitemaps, Robots & Geolocating in WMT
Hi Guys, I have a site that has now been launched in the US having originally just been UK. In order to accommodate this, the website has been set-up using directories for each country. Example: domain.com/en-gb domain.com/en-us As the site was originally set-up for UK, the sitemap, robots file & Webmaster Tools account were added to the main domain. Example: domain.com/sitemap.xml domain.com/robots.txt The question is does this now need changing to make it specific for each country. Example: The sitemap and robots.txt for the UK would move to: domain.com/en-gb/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-gb/robots.txt and the US would have its own separate sitemap and robots.txt. Example : domain.com/en-us/sitemap.xml domain.com/en-us/robots.txt Also in order to Geolocate this in WMT would this need to be done for each directory version instead of the main domain? Currently the WMT account for the UK site is verified at www.domain.com, would this need reverifying at domain.com/en-gb? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks!
International SEO | | CarlWint0 -
Multi-lingual Site (Tags & XML SiteMap Question)
We have two sites that target users in two different countries in different languages in the following manner: Site 1 es.site1.com - Spanish version Site 2 site2.com/francais/.............. Navigation and content are translated into the foreign language from English What is the best way to let Google know about these multi-lingual pages: A. Add the rel="alternate" and hreflang= in the source code for the hunders of pages we have. B. Or is there a tool we can use to crawl and create XML site maps for different language pages. What do we need to do in the XML site map so that Google know that sitemap1.xml for example relates to Spanish as an example many thanks
International SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Why is GoogleBot crawling our German site and rendering it in English.
We have a German website at (http://de.pa.com) and we can't get the search engines to index the site in German language.  For some reason the GoogleBot, BingBot, etc are crawling de.pa.com and displaying English text on the SERP.  I've tried testing via web-sniffer.net and Google Webmaster tools which both are crawling de.pa.com in English. We know the page titles/meta descriptions are in English which we are updating to German, but I'm curious to why search engines are indexing our German site and displaying on the SERP as English text when the entire content of the site is in German. Thank you, Brian
International SEO | | Liamis0 -
.im domain ranking globally?
Hello all, I know that Matt Cutt's stated a while back that .co domains would become recognized by google as a gtld and was wondering how google views .im domains. I was looking at using a couple for work but have a generic name .im of my own that when checked in webmaster tools is locked to the isle of man in the geographical targeting option. I was wondering if anyone can advise me on this and if possible provide some feedback based on experience with .im domains. Thanks.
International SEO | | LukeHutchinson0 -
Correct Hreflang & Canonical Implementation for Multilingual Site
OK, 2 primary questions for a multilingual site. This specific site has 2 language so I'll use that for the examples. 1 - Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag Necessary? The first is regarding the correct implementation of hreflang, and whether or not I should have a self-referencing hreflang tag. In other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), I am uncertain whether the source code should contain the second line below: Obviously the Spanish version should reference the English version, but does it need to reference itself? I have seen both versions implemented, with seemingly good results, but I want to know the best practice if it exists. 2 - Canonical of Current Language or Default Language? The second questions is regarding which canonical to use on the secondary language pages. I am aware of the update to the Google Webmaster Guidelines recently that state not to use canonical, but they say not to do it because everyone was messing it up, not because it shouldn't be done. So, in other words, if I am looking at the source code for http://www.example.com/es/ (our Spanish subfolder), which of the two following canonicals is correct? OR For this question, you can assume that (A) the English version of the site is our default and (B) the content is identical. Thanks guys, feel free to ask any qualifiers you think are relevant.
International SEO | | KaneJamison1