IP Address of Server an SEO Factor??
-
Hello all,
Interested to hear your thoughts on this.
-
What's best practice re server IP location. Is it OK for that to be in the US if your company is in Europe?
-
Any potential issues?
John Mueller says server location is irrelevant, but some developer I work with thinks IP address of the server is a factor. I can't see how it would be in this day and age.
https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-geo-location-server-google-17468.html
Many thanks,
Gill.
-
-
Thank you both very much for your comments. Very useful! Cheers.
-
This section, from the post you shared, really does sum it up nicely:
"
Is the server location important for geotargeting?
A: If you can use one of the other means to set geotargeting (ccTLD or Webmaster Tools’ geotargeting tool), you don’t need worry about the server’s location. We do, however, recommend making sure that your website is hosted in a way that will give your users fast access to it (which is often done by choosing hosting near your users).But overall, it is nice to see such a strong word used by John, as "many cases it's irrelevant."
So if you are not using a ccTLD and you didn't set your geo-details in Webmaster Tools and the language and content on the site don't strongly suggest country bias, then server location is important but you'd have to think, how important..."
If you follow best practice for delivering content to a specific geographic audience, you're really not going to need to worry about server location (providing it meets all of the other requirements).
-
As you say, a very small role (if other factors are not taken into account). If you take what John Mueller says in "many cases it's irrelevant." It really is such a small factor it can be safely ignore - assuming you've got the rest of your site in order.
-
The CDN will cover that. This isn't a bad article to read through: http://wplang.org/hosting-location-geotargeting-seo-cdn/
-
Hi Gill,
The server's location plays a very small role.You definitely don't need to host your website in any specific geographic location.
I'm sharing a similar old thread @ https://moz.com/community/q/does-the-location-of-my-server-effect-my-seo
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Thanks for the info.
So if your audience is a global one - how would you handle where to have the server?
Is there such a thing of using more than one server to have good response speed in more than one location?
-
Server location alone isn't going to be a factor in itself, but the closer the proximity to the target audience, the faster the server's response will be - generally speaking, assuming server specs are the same. So, while server location isn't going to be a factor (in isolation), server response times and the speed of the site is.
Test your site speed using Google's Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ or GTMetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/
There are a number of methods to speed up the responsiveness of your site, which will be highlighted in the results, from the tests, above.
Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver your page content rapidly, while reducing the load on your server, is one method to improve your page load times. There's also a number of caching and data compression tools available, depending on your website's infrastructure.
As a rule, I generally try to locate a server as near to my target audience as possible, on AWS servers, using a lightweight framework.
I hope that helps.
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
-
Lightboxes and SEO
Do lightboxes (AKA popup boxes when you click "learn more" type CTAs) have any negative effect on SEO? We are looking at revamping our sites to have more of a tiled approach, and a lightbox with summary content popping out with additional CTAs, directing to pages with more information or free trial pages. Is there any downside to this approach from an organic perspective? is there anything specific to keep in mind when creating these if not?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chris81980 -
Which is the best SEO plugin for joomla
Hey there, can any one please tell me the Best plugin i can choose For joomla?? I am going use sh404ref & 2nd one i am thinking is EFSEO. If besides This do u know any Good One, Please Help to choose Best Thanx in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | poojaverify060 -
Yoast seo title question
I was referred to this plugin and have found it to be the most irritating and poorly designed plugin in the world. I want to be able to set my titles without it changing my page headers as well. For instance - If I set my title to be "This is my article name | site name" it will make my H1 tag read the same. I do not want or desire this nonsense. Why would they think this is something wise? Why would I want my site name on every single H1 tag on my site? How can I fix this? I only want my title to be my title. I want my H1 tag to remain the post/page name that I define in wordpress.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
SEO and former site
Hi, my client had a site built and hosted with Avvo but we now shut it down and are using a new server. My concern is that Avvo's internal link structure is causing SEO issues. For example, his site will list for "San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney", but is then removed for no reason. Far worse, while he had the AVVO site, it would never rank at all on Google. He's got great content, and no spammy links. This is the site: www.thesandiegocriminallawyer.com. Any thoughts of what I could do to disavow the AVVO pages that Google still has indexed? Does it matter? Or, is it simply a function of time? Thank you for your help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
# element above Menu - Is there any SEO Value to it
Is there any Value to having the H1 element above the MENU in a Typical Application ? My intention is to tell the "Bot" that the H1 element is more important than the Menu Items . Are there any examples of such sites . The closest that I have seen is (NOT MY SITES) http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/ and http://www.airfarewatchdog.com/cheap-flights/from-dallas-texas/1531/?airport_code=dfw&depsub=1&c2calert=0&deal_alert=0&from_hp=true Here they (second link) they have H1 above the Bread Crumb ( they dont have any menu though).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chaits0 -
Any SEO suggestions for my site?
Site in question: http://bit.ly/Lcspfp Does anyone have any suggestions for any on-site SEO that would benefit my website? Any recommendations, big or small are appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichardTaylor1 -
If you have an unlimited SEO budget, what would you do?
Here's a bit of background information: I've achieved the targets and is now being offered what is essentially an unlimited budget. I have a nice list of ideas but thought I would the brilliant people here at the SEOMOZ community what they would do. So as to promote as much response as possible, I'm going to keep my list to myself for now. And by "SEO", I mean I can do things like content strategy, blogging, infographics, etc. Shoot away!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andrep0