Hosting your website where you customers are located ?
-
Is it possible and recommended to host a website in Switzerland ending in.com to rank in the United States ?
Or is it better to host it in the country you are targeting ? I know in WMT you can choose the country you want to target but is it as efficient as hosting it on a server located in the country ?
Thanks,
-
Thank you,
-
Hi,
Because it is still understood to be an SEO signal, I would be erring on the side of caution and going with hosting in the country where the client / visitors are located.
John Mueller did confirm that it might have a small benefit, but as there has been little additional confirmation of this recently, I would avoid hosting in a different country if the option is available.
https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-geo-location-server-google-17468.html
-Andy
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
-
Getting accurate Geo Location traffic stats in Google Analytics - HELP
One of our clients services the US and the UK, but having looked at the report over an extended period of time we can still see that the vast majority of traffic is coming from the US. I.e. our last report for March indicated that there were over 3,000 users in the US but only 6 in the UK. We know that Google Analytics works out a user’s location based on where their IP is located and not their physical location, and that this means that the data needs to be taken with a pinch of salt as it won’t always represent what you expect. That being said, we know that the traffic figures for Europe are largely inaccurate and would like to get some more accurate stats to report on. Is there a way to do so at all within Google Analytics?
International SEO | | Wagada1 -
Best way to interlink 25 different language versions of a website?
I have a website which has 25 different language versions on 16 different domains. Hreflan are setup to point to different language versions. In the footer we have deeplinks to the 25 language versions. Site is not spammy but in small niche and many language versions have very few other external links. For some time this site had lost rankings for reasons that are unclear till now. I see that large international sites such as booking.com, tripadvisor, apple all use different approaches to interlink their language versions. Interestingly Tripadvisor is nowadays loading the links to their other language versions dynamically only upon click so that these links do not show up in source code, deviating from their former implementation of static deeplinks to all language versions. Matt Cutts mentioned back in 2013 “If you have 50 different sites, I wouldn’t link to all 50 sites down in the footer of your website, because that can start to look pretty spammy to users. Instead you might just link to no more than three or four or five down in the footer, that sort of thing, or have a link to a global page, and the global page can talk about all the different verions and country versions of your website.” But in their webmaster guidelines google recommends: "Consider cross-linking each language version of a page. That way, a French user who lands on the German version of your page can get to the right language version with a single click." I assume for SEO anyway these links have no value, but for user experience it would certainly be better to provide somewhere deeplinks to other language versions. Also the fact that language versions are on different domains and have few external backlinks may increase a bit the risk in our case. I guess in doubt I would prefer to be safe and load deeplinks only upon click same as tripadvisor. Any thoughts/suggestions on best interlinking in our specific case?
International SEO | | lcourse0 -
How To Rank A UK Website On Google.com (US)
Hi, I've done some research on this but couldn't find any definitive answer I can trust! We have a client who resides in the UK. They have '.com' domain, hosted on a UK server, using UK spelling. Their business objective for this year is to expand in the USA, including the opening of a warehouse over there. They are wanting us to rank their website on both Google.co.uk and Google.com (North America); besides changing the geolocation settings in GWT's, and building links from .com websites is there anything else we can do to increase their visibility on Google.com? Many thanks in advance, appreciated!
International SEO | | Webpresence
Lee.0 -
Another website clone issue
My site has been cloned by this f........ http://designer.aimeeprom.com/ original site http://www.5starweddingdirectory.com Still has our logo etc... How can we prevent this from happening, What should I do next. I have pinged them via the interactive chat but they do not reply..
International SEO | | Taiger0 -
Google Places - Add external location?
Hi Mozzers, We operate in Belgium and just recently we also opened a location in the Netherlands. This is a trainingslocation but there is no staff present. We want to add this location to our Google Places account. It seems we need to enter it is as different company profile. Does Google have a problem with the fact that there is no staff present on adres of this company profile and the location is managed by our HQ in Belgium?
International SEO | | wellnesswooz0 -
Hosting accounts
Hi folks, I would appreciate your thoughts on this. So, I work with a company who is based in Canada. I work in the US branch. There is little or no trouble for the website ranking well in Canada due to the lack of competition. That said, it is a bit more challenging here in the US due to extreme competition. My Question: Does having the site hosted in Canada make it any more difficult for the site to rank well in the US? As always, thanks so much. I love this place!!!
International SEO | | APICDA0 -
French Canadian Website and French Language URLs
Hello, One of my clients has a question on a new Quebec, Canada version of their website. The website content and copy is in the French Canadian language, but the IT Director has asked if, for the purpose of SEO, should the URLs be in French as well? So, this questions has two parts... For SEO, should the URL's be in French or left in English, to avoid crawl errors? For visitor UX, is there any reason to have them in French versus English?
International SEO | | Aviatech0 -
How to overcome server and WHOIS location
What if we published an address in the UK as the contact/WHOIS details but wanted to target the USA market? The server resides in the UK, the domain WHOIS resides in the UK - but what are the best methods to target the US search market? The domain is a .com domain.
International SEO | | Peter2640