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Thanks guys for your feedback.  Another dimension to this.

If I am an Australian business targeting Australian customers but host offshore.  Does it matter from an SEO point of view if I use domainname.com or domainname.com.au?  I understand it may impact what the customer thinks but I am more interested in it from an SEO perspective and if the domain extension is important.

Further does the registration address (i.e. whois data) matter.  For example we are Australian based but our domain registration address is in the US.

I assume these are all subtle things but I am interested to understand if they have an impact on SEO.

Thanks

HI All,

We are an Australian business with our hosting currently based in Australia.

We have recently been considering moving hosts for a few reasons.  In particular when we have done analysis of hosting in the US and also with Rackspace say in Hong Kong we have found that the prices can be significantly cheaper or with more bells in whistles provided in the hosting of a dedicated server offshore vs Australia for the same price.

Therefore from this point of view we would be much better off moving our hosting to the US or HK with Rackspace.

There are the issues such as latency to take on board but lets put that to the side for the moment as we are mostly interested in understanding if offshore hosting will impact us from an SEO perspective and if so how and can these impacts be mitigated.

So our first question is

a) if we move our hosting offshore, will this impact our SEO?

b) if it does impact our seo, how will it impact (ie lose rankings for organic pages due to IP address being offshore)?

c) is A is also an impact are there ways of eliminating these impacts outlined in B?

d) net - if the impacts on seo can be mitigated will the net result still be negative or could we still be seen on the same footing as a domain hosted in Australia?

Thanks

Sean

Michael, I would be interested to understand this question in a different way.  While you may optimise a page for say one or two keywords from an SEO point of view, how might that vary (if at all) for an SEM campaign.  In many cases the same page (especially a product page) will be used for SEO and SEM so I would be interested to extend your question and say in addition how many keywords should you optimise for an SEM campaign and then for a combined SEM and SEO campaign as well as just the SEO campaign?  Is there any real difference?