Does location of my VPS and IP adress matter to Google's ranking?
-
We're busy with adding a German version of our webshop. Right now we're quit successful in The Netherlands with our webshop and SEO. I wonder if Google minds the location of the website (VPS) and IP address concerning SEO for our German webshop. If I Google on this subject I can not find a clear answer. Can somebody help me?
-
Ok, so, to clear the topic. It CAN matter, the keyword is "can", specifically for local content. The IP is one of many-many things, which is assessed by google for rankings, but far not the most important one.
Here is my recommendation:
If you are going to use completely different website with different tld for german version, like website.de and now you have website.nl, then yes, it might make sense to have separate hosting package and server in germany. Yet, you'd need to use hreflangs anyway, saying that it's the same company and website, just in different languages. Also you'd specify that in your GSC. That directly tells google what website is for what country. Therefore there wouldn't be any confusion on Google's side.
Now, here is another example. Let's say you are in Holland, content on the website has content about Holland and Germany, you have website.com domain (neutral, not .nl or .de), then Google maybe kinda confused in terms of where to rank you and look at IP.
Hope this makes sense.
-
In all the video's matt says it does matter, I'm a bit confused. Our webshop is located in Holland right know, but we'll start a German version of it soon. Is my SEO negative affected when my webserver is still located in Holland or, not? Can somebody give me some advise?
-
Howdy.
In short - no, it doesn't matter. There are several videos from Matt Cutts on this topic. They're a bit old, but still apply. https://www.google.com/search?q=server+location+matt+cutts&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiGveX-uurRAhUCr1QKHbtYClkQ_AUICSgC&biw=1745&bih=864
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
-
How Best To Accommodate A Site's Changing Subject Matter?
Hi, I'm dealing with a several year old site that has had a lot of success in organic search around one particular subject and is now evolving into other subjects. Would like your experience on how best to handle this. Here's what we have so far: First, the site was about niche craft carpentry. Then, it added training. Then, it added training in other subjects in smatterings, like plumbing, electrical, etc. Now it's considering adding training in subjects even further from niche craft carpentry. So, interior decorator training, landscaping training, etc. Nearly all of it's organic search traffic (about 200,00 per month) comes from blogs, articles and discussions related to the original topic of niche craft carpentry... not training. As we've branched out from carpentry into carpentry training and then other subject training, have not had great success in organic with these new less related topics. We've had some for carpentry training type terms, but not much else. If the site owners are hell bent on expanding into these other training subjects for business reasons other than search, how would you structure it? For instance, would you go originalsitename.com/landscaping or landscaping.OriginalSiteName.com or what? I understand that a landscaping.originalsitename.com is for all intents and purposes a new domain name and won't have the authority of the original. However, would it have more chance of breaking free of how Google has pigeon-holed the original site's subject matter as niche carpentry-relevant only? Or, would you just keep adding subjects to the original domain name and figure that one of these days google is going to see it as the Lynda.com of an expanding galaxy of home improvement? I should add that the future of the site is training, so landscape training or interior design training is pretty far from high end niche carpentry stuff. What do you think? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
I should keep looking at the IP address location on my backlink prospects?
Hello Everyone, I'm doing a backlink research and we are considering how to define a strategy. My website is located in Spain and I am focusing on ranking my website on Google.es for public coming from Spain. The thing is that until now I used to look carefully at the IP address of my backlink prospects, to check if the website was really hosted in Spain. I know Matt Cutts used to say very long ago that hosting location of a website was important. But taking into account that nowadays with cloud servers, CDNs, AnyCast and such technologies it's no longer possible to accurately identify the location of a website, specially if the CDN of the websites uses AnyCast, so that an IP address can be used by different machines in different locations. Do you guys think I should keep looking at the IP address location on my backlink prospects?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | C.A0 -
Google can't access/crawl my site!
Hi I'm dealing with this problem for a few days. In fact i didn't realize it was this serious until today when i saw most of my site "de-indexed" and losing most of the rankings. [URL Errors: 1st photo] 8/21/14 there were only 42 errors but in 8/22/14 this number went to 272 and it just keeps going up. The site i'm talking about is gazetaexpress.com (media news, custom cms) with lot's of pages. After i did some research i came to the conclusion that the problem is to the firewall, who might have blocked google bots from accessing the site. But the server administrator is saying that this isn't true and no google bots have been blocked. Also when i go to WMT, and try to Fetch as Google the site, this is what i get: [Fetch as Google: 2nd photo] From more than 60 tries, 2-3 times it showed Complete (and this only to homepage, never to articles). What can be the problem? Can i get Google to crawl properly my site and is there a chance that i will lose my previous rankings? Thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | granitgash
Granit FvhvDVR.png dKx3m1O.png0 -
Google's Stance on "Hidden" Content
Hi, I'm aware Google doesn't care if you have helpful content you can hide/unhide by user interaction. I am also aware that Google frowns upon hiding content from the user for SEO purposes. We're not considering anything similar to this. The issue is, we will be displaying only a part of our content to the user at a time. We'll load 3 results on each page initially. These first 3 results are static, meaning on each initial page load/refresh, the same 3 results will display. However, we'll have a "Show Next 3" button which replaces the initial results with the next 3 results. This content will be preloaded in the source code so Google will know about it. I feel like Google shouldn't have an issue with this since we're allowing the user action to cycle through all results. But I'm curious, is it an issue that the user action does NOT allow them to see all results on the page at once? I am leaning towards no, this doesn't matter, but would like some input if possible. Thanks a lot!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirmeliux0 -
Where's all the text?
Hi, We recently (yesterday) had a developer make a new site for us on Wix http://www.appointeddhq.com/ as the one we were planning to put up had a few teething issues (the beackend booking system wasn't ready and we needed something up immediately for a TV show we were being featured in). Having now had the chance to look through it, I'm not quite sure what's going on. None of the text appears to be there on any page, I can't find any of the descriptions we gave the developer, the alt tags behind pictures (and even the pics themselves) don't appear to be there, the URLs are messed up, titles are incorrect and there are no title tags to be found. Am I misunderstanding or is the whole site built in java? Obviously, this is quite a huge issue and I'll want to get it sorted immediately, but I thought it best to see what the good folks here though. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeahHutcheon0 -
Can I Improve Organic Ranking by Restrict Website Access to Specific IP Address or Geo Location?
I am targeting my website in US so need to get high organic ranking in US web search. One of my competitor is restricting website access to specific IP address or Geo location. I have checked multiple categories to know more. What's going on with this restriction and why they make it happen? One of SEO forum is also restricting website access to specific location. I can understand that, it may help them to stop thread spamming with unnecessary Sign Up or Q & A. But, why Lamps Plus have set this? Is there any specific reason? Can I improve my organic ranking? Restriction may help me to save and maintain user statistic in terms of bounce rate, average page views per visit, etc...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit1 -
Don't want to lose page rank, what's the best way to restructure a url other than a 301 redirect?
Currently in the process of redesigning a site. What i want to know, is what is the best way for me to restructure the url w/out it losing its value (page rank) other than a 301 redirect?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marig0 -
Ranking for our member's company names without giving them all away!
Hi, We have a directory of 25,000 odd companies who use our site. We have a strong PR site and want to rank a page for each company name. Some initial testing on one or two company names brings us to #2 after the company's own web site in the format: "Company Name Reviews and Feedback" - so it works well. We want to do this for all 25,000 of our members, however we do not wish to make it easy for our competitors to scrape through our member database!! e.g. using: www.ourdomain.com/randomstring/company-name-(profile).php unfortunately with the above performing a search on google for site:domain.com/()/()(profile).php would bring up all records. Are there any tried and tested ways of achieving what we're after here? Many Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0
