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
-
Looking for an SEO Mentor
I do in-house marketing for a medium sized luxury architectural design firm. I have a good understanding of the moz platform and general SEO but would like to findsomeone to provide regular guidance and answer some specific questions regarding our SEO. Specifically, we want advising on keywords, blog content, and link building. Ideally we'd like to engage a consultant (remotely) on an hourly basis. We'v have had very poor experiences with big SEO firms so that’s definitely not something we’re looking for. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WorkshopAPD
Caio0 -
What IP Address does Googlebot use to read your site when coming from an external backlink?
Hi All, I'm trying to find more information on what IP address Googlebot would use when arriving to crawl your site from an external backlink. I'm under the impression Googlebot uses international signals to determine the best IP address to use when crawling (US / non-US) and then carries on with that IP when it arrives to your website? E.g. - Googlebot finds www.example.co.uk. Due to the ccTLD, it decides to crawl the site with a UK IP address rather than a US one. As it crawls this UK site, it finds a subdirectory backlink to your website and continues to crawl your website with the aforementioned UK IP address. Is this a correct assumption, or does Googlebot look at altering the IP address as it enters a backlink / new domain? Also, are ccTLDs the main signals to determine the possibility of Google switching to an international IP address to crawl, rather than the standard US one? Am I right in saying that hreflang tags don't apply here at all, as their purpose is to be used in SERPS and helping Google to determine which page to serve to users based on their IP etc. If anyone has any insight this would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos0 -
Local SEO for a community.
How would one go about best doing local SEO for a townhome community? It seems to fall in between the traditional imformational SEO and the brick and mortar, G+ page model. There seems to be no way to attack the NAP, directory and traditional citation model for a certain region they build in. Any thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AESEO0 -
SEO Recommendations
For about 3 years our website was number one in Google.co.uk for our trades main keyphrase which resulted in excellent sales. About 12 months ago that position started to slide downwards and for that keyphrase we are now number 10. We are still at number's 1,2 and 3 for several other keyphrases but ones that result in fewer daily Google searches and resultant sales. I have always added unique content to the site but admit that my blog posts became less than daily over the past 12 months. However I am adding posts as often as I can now, of good length and of unique content. As well as tweaking all our online seo factors I'm trying to add good backlinks as often as possible. I wonder if anyone has been in a similar position and what they did to try and regain their previous position? Colin
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NileCruises0 -
SEO Feedback Please
Hi, I was hoping to get some feedback on this site's SEO: http://www.chantre.com/ I also have different URLs which can be accessed from the left side of the site under "Quick Search Links" that go to the different offices within this company. Thoughts on how to improve would be great. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gXe0 -
Bing Ranking Factors
I have a site and we rank very competitively on Google, but we would like to increase our exposure on Bing and Yahoo. I was wondering if anybody might have some tips or pointers for increasing your ranking on Bing. Also, if anybody knows of any Bing ranking guides or top ranking factors for Bing that would be very useful too. Thanks, Jason
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jason_3420 -
Google WMT Change of address.
Hey all. I've got two domain names. -rt112media.com -route112media.com http://rt112media.com is my main address. The preferred domain. My Google WMT account has 4 sites listed that I am a verified owner on. 1.)rt112media.com 2.)www.rt112media.com 3.)route112media.com 4.)www.route112media.com I recent changed the address in WMT for route112media.com to have the preferred domain rt112media.com. I did this on Nov 23. It is currently saying their is a request and I can withdrawl. Now I'm needing to set the preferred for www.rt112media.com to be rt112media.com but it will not let me because of the pending route112media.com. The problem is I'm getting a ton of errors under my www.rt112media.com diagnostics. I'm not getting any under rt112media.com but I am thinking it is still effecting my page rank. I have the 301's for all set up as a 301 wildcard to rt112media.com. They all redirect to the preferred domain I wan (rt112media.com.) Suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Route112Media0 -
Changing Business Addresses
Anyone have a good local search "best practices" resource for advising a client who is changing business addresses (aside from cross your fingers). For example, order of updating local citations (website first, google places, others). Time frame for update to take effect? Other issues folks have faced in updating addresses? I regularly follow David Mihm, Mike Blumenthal, & Andrew Shotland, I was just curious what the Moz community might be able to add. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gyi0