Hosting Change & It's Impact on SERP Performance (with a Side of Domain Migration)

[SafeNet_Interactive_Marketing]

Hi everyone,

I've read a lot on forums about the topic of hosting and it's impact on SEO, but I've seen conflicting opinions. I wanted to see if anyone might have a definitive answer for this scenario:

Our parent company is based in the EU and wants to move our English domain to their site -- either as part of the main .com or potentially as a new subdomain. One of those things is going to happen; it's just a question of which one. One issue I have is that they host their .com with content targeting English speakers (mostly in the U.S.) in France, so if we moved our content to their site we'd be going from our existing domain hosted in the U.S. (with the majority of visitors coming from the U.S.) to a site that's hosted in France.

I've read that folders are still usually better over subdomains in terms of passing the strength of the domain on to pages. So... would it be better to have a subdomain hosted in the U.S., or just have folders under the main domain, but that content would be hosted in France?

Our existing domain and the domain we'll be moving to are about even in terms of domain authority and size.

Happy to get any feedback you might have. Anyone come across any case studies on this particular topic that would be helpful?

Thanks!

[SafeNet_Interactive_Marketing]

As a followup to the above, do you have any thoughts on exactly how significant a factor server location is today? I know https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#2 says that it is not a "definitive signal."

However, I'm at a point where IT needs to be convinced a CDN would be worth the investment, so I'm looking for a way to quantify the SEO impact of the server being hosted outside the country of your target audience - which I haven't been able to do yet.

Has anyone seen any case studies/quantifiable info about this online? I know it's difficult to put numbers to a single ranking factor's impact.

Additionally, for geotargeting in the Search Console, today over 60% of the .com traffic is from English speakers in the U.S. We use hreflang tags, but even so, a little over 30% of the traffic is non-U.S., so I would expect geotargeting our subdirectory for the U.S. audience specifically could have a negative impact on the non-U.S. traffic. Thoughts?

[DirkC]

Hi,

Check the answer of Cyrus Shepard on this question: http://moz.com/community/q/are-cdn-s-good-or-bad-for-seo-edmonton-web - I fear it will be hard to find other quantified data.

"We've done a lot of studies here at Moz and what we've found is this:

• There does seem to be a slight correlation between site speed and rankings (keep in mind that correlation is not causation)
• Our studies have not found a relationship between CDNs and higher rankings.

So the evidence would seem to suggest that CDNs can help your website speed, and it's possible to help your rankings, simply using a CDN by itself is no guarantee."

Hope this helps,

Dirk

[SafeNet_Interactive_Marketing]

Dirk,

I really appreciate the thorough response. I didn't know that you could host different folders in different locations. When it comes to server stuff, it's one of my weakest areas. I really appreciate that suggestion. It's likely going to be the solution I bring to the group, and I'll definitely use webmaster tools to geotarget.

They aren't currently using a CDN, but I'll put that on the table as an option to explore.

We use the hreflang tag on our existing site, and I'll make sure the parent domain we're moving to implements it before we move our content in.

Again, thank you very much for the help.

Andrew

[DirkC]

Thanks for the compliment Egol!

[EGOL]

Dirk,  what a great and generous reply.  I learned a coule thing that I will need shortly.

Thanks!

[DirkC]

Hi

Both questions are not completely related. Technically it is possible to have different hosts for different folders - so it's possible to have yourdomain.com/fr/mypage hosted in France & yourdomain.com/en/mypage in the US (see also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1848605/can-a-website-subdirectory-be-served-by-a-different-web-server)

If you have to choose between folders / subdomains - go for folders (see also this post: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating)

If you check the signals Google is using to determine which country you are targeting (check https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192#2)

• 1: geotargeting - it's perfectly possible to activate two webmastertool accounts for yoursite.com/fr targeting the French market & yoursite.com/us targeting the US market

• 2. server location - is used as a hint & became less important with the use of CDN's (mainly important for performance reasons). If you use a CDN there should be no problem even when the "main" site is hosted in France.

-3. other hints like address, use of local language:  it's probably a good idea to use the content-language metatag in the head of your HTML. If identical pages exist in different language versions - it's probably a good idea to use the hreflang tag to make it obvious to Google which part of the site is targeting which audience. For hreflang - this generator can be useful: https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool & this tool to check if everything is implemented as should http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

In your case - I would go to

• separate folder - geotargeted in Webmastertools
• hosted in US - if this not possible: use CDN
• if different language versions of the same page exist across the site: hreflang to make it obvious for Google which part of the site is targeting which language / country - use content-language metatag.

Hope this helps

Dirk