IP Address of Server an SEO Factor??

[Cannetastic]

Hello all,

Interested to hear your thoughts on this.

1. What's best practice re server IP location. Is it OK for that to be in the US if your company is in Europe?

2. 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.

[Cannetastic]

Thank you both very much for your comments. Very useful! Cheers.

[Hurf]

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).

[Hurf]

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.

[Hurf]

The CDN will cover that. This isn't a bad article to read through: http://wplang.org/hosting-location-geotargeting-seo-cdn/

[Alick300]

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

[Cannetastic]

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?

[Hurf]

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.