Geographic location of hosting affect SEO
-
Can anyone confirm if its the geographic location of the web hosting or the domain hosting that can affect seo ? I have a client who has their domain hosting and Website hosting in Australia however their they have a .co.nz and their target market is in New Zealand. thank you
-
The correct answer is: yes, but it is not a major factor anymore. Please refer to the another similar post herehere http://moz.com/community/q/can-geographic-location-of-web-server-affect-in-seo
" 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.
Said that, a best practice is to follow one of these options:
- hosting the site in the country targeted;
- using an IP assigned to the targeted country and operate via proxy " - @gfiorelli1
Thanks
Rashesh
-
It would appear that it's not such a big deal. Generally the ccTLD is a good indicator of intent. But you can actually target your country of choice in Google Webmaster Tools. That would count as yet another signal that your client is targeting New Zealand.
A similar question was recently answered in the Moz forum. I would look there as well.
Some things you can do to target your location:
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Meta Data
- Contact Information
- Schema Markup
The only thing I would be concerned about is if there was a better web host in New Zealand, or if competitors were using a CDN. That would generally make their sites faster, one through geography and one through infrastructure. Either way, that's a strong ranking factor where you may lose out.
Other than that, it looks like you and your client should be alright in regard to your question.
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
-
Domain Masking SEO Impact
I hope I am explaining this correctly. If I need to provide any clarity please feel free to ask. We currently use a domain mask on an external platform that points back to our site. We are a non-profit and the external site allows users to create peer-to peer fundraisers that benefit our ministry. Currently we get many meta issues related to this site as well as broken links when fundraisers expire etc. We do not have a need to rank for the information from this site. Is there a way to index these pages so that they are not a part of the search engine site crawls as it relates to our site?
Technical SEO | | SamaritansPurse0 -
Trailing Slashes and SEO
Hi, We're currently using a third party blog platform (Blog Engine) on our site and we have a trailing slash issue. I can add as many trailing slashes as I want to the blog's homepage URL, but they don't redirect and our dev guys say this cannot be done with Blog Engine. We're in the process of building our own blog but, in the meantime, I just wanted to know if this will cause an issue? Individual blog posts with trailing slashes are redirected, it's just the homepage where it can't be done. I haven't noticed any traffic going to a blog URL with trailing slashes, and I don't believe any URLs with trailing slashes are being indexed, so should this be OK? Cheers, Lewis
Technical SEO | | PeaSoupDigital0 -
IP redirect possible SEO issues?
Hi I help manage a small eCommerce business that sells worldwide. We currently have 4 stores www.tidy-books.com (US site) www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) www.tidy-books.eu (EU) www.tidy-bboks.com.au (AU) We have auto redirect based on the country of your IP. The .com is the route address though. Currently I have decided to focus all my energies with link building etc on .com as it seems to carry the most weight and being a very small team we don't have the resources for separate campaigns for all websites at the moment. Whilst I've done on site SEO with country in mind i.e for US kids instead of children. I'm just wondering if you can see any pitfalls in this approach, Ideally I would like to have a team focus on each store separately and have them as separate domains but with the IP redirect we at least rank well in Google for the .com and the customers gets sent to the relevant store. Any thoughts would be great
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Dedicated ip helpful for seo
I read somewhere a while back that having a dedicated ip address was helpful for seo if this true or just another rumor? Also I read you should purchase your domain name for multiple yrs, what do you guys think?
Technical SEO | | TinaGammon0 -
SEO Checklist
Ok I know that this would be a huge over-simplification but I am wondering if there is (at least a bird's eye view) a checklist of SEO do's and dont's? I checked to see if something like this existed but could not find one. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks~
Technical SEO | | bobbabuoy0 -
Hosting in the US for an Australian website
Hi, I was wondering whether it's still important for SEO to host a website in the same country as you're targetting. We host a fair few Australian sites and we're looking for a new webhost at the moment. Should we only consider hosting on Australian servers or is it worth looking at servers elsewhere? One of the main reasons we're thinking about US hosting is that we can get a machine that is 3x more powerful than we can get in Australia for the price. This performance increase should go some way to minimizing the effect of the latency increase. Thanks, Nick
Technical SEO | | MarketingResults0 -
Fastest Hosting Company
Who has the fastest hosting company? what major provider has fastest service for page load times? Looking for affordability like godaddy.
Technical SEO | | bozzie3110