Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks very much Tymen!

Hello,

Does MOZ have a tool which allows for keyword research to find long-tail keywords which are worth putting in the effort to rank for (keyword effectiveness rank)?

This also includes being able to see traffic stats for number of searches by keyword, by country?

Kind regards,
Mark

Hi Tom,

Thank you very much for the fast reply and helpful answer!

I have also posted a couple CDN conversations on:
1. https://moz.com/community/q/what-is-the-effect-of-cloudflare-cdn-on-page-load-speeds-hosting-ip-location-and-the-ultimate-seo-effect
2. https://moz.com/community/q/what-happens-with-seo-when-a-site-is-served-via-cloudflare-cfn

If you feel like adding your thoughts there as well (entirely up to you) I would value them immensely.

Kind regards,
Mark

Hello,

I was wondering if hosting on shared, versus VPS, versus dedicated ... matter at all in terms of the rankings of Web sites ... given that all other factors would be exactly equal.

I know this is a big question with many variables, but mainly I am wondering if, for example, it is more the risk of resource usage which may take a site down if too much traffic and therefore make it un-crawlable if it happens at the moment that a bot is trying to index the site (factoring out the UX of a downed site).

Any and all comments are greatly appreciated!

Best regards,
Mark

Hello,

I was hoping someone could help me understand if there is any point to submit a domain or subdomain to Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools) and Bing Webmaster Tools if the pages (on the subdomain for example) all have nofollow/noindex tags ... or the pages are being blocked by the robots.txt file).

There are some pages on a data feed onto a subdomain which I manage that have these above characteristics ... which I cannot change ... but I am wondering if it is better to simply exclude from submitting those from GWT and BWT (above) thereby eliminating generating errors or warnings ... or is it better to tell Google and Bing about them anyway then perhaps there is a chance those nofollow pages may be indexed/contextualised in some way, making it worth the effort?

Many thanks!
Mark

Hi Richard,

Hey thank you very much for the fast and helpful reply!

To me it makes sense to host close to where your main customer base is, even with a CDN, even if there are posts which say that specifying the geo in Google Search Console / Webmaster Tools pretty much overrides the hosting location in terms of location context (or ... "mainly"):
https://moz.com/community/q/what-happens-with-seo-when-a-site-is-served-via-cloudflare-cfn

Given things are so hyper-competitive, to me it makes sense to incorporate every miniscule refinement where they all add up over time, in other words set up hosting closest to the customer base.

It seems that perhaps a VPS plan hosted in the US is probably the most sensible option at the moment, as I have sites that are specific to 7 countries but they use ccTLD ... and the rest of the 141 sites or so that I am running are for global targeting, but probably 40% of the traffic would come from US, 30% from Europe.   I guess I could create 2 VPS plans and host one in Europe but for now it seems perhaps not worth the effort and expense.

What are your thoughts on the article above?

Best regards,
Mark

Hello,

I have read that it is vital for a site to be indexed in Chinese search engines that it needs to be hosted in China on a server with a Chinese IP address, is this true?

The site in question is a .cn site, hosted in USA currently, but served via CloudFlare (which has locations in China).

Any advice on how to rank a Chinese site would be greatly appreciated, including if you know anyone who I can hire to create a Chinese sitemap file to submit to Chinese search engines (and even optimise the site).

Many thanks,
Mark

Hello,

I would love it if anyone could advise whether to use VPS, shared or dedicated hosting to host 50 WordPress sites and around 50 other one page flat HTML sites ... with everything being served via CloudFlare.

Of course my main concerns are page load times, security etc.

I know it's a big question, but I would be very appreciative of the thoughts people have, and any recommendations.

Kind regards,
Mark

Hello,

With regards to hosting, it is my understanding that one of the search engine ranking factors for a particular geographic location (city/country) is where a site is hosted physically geographically.

For example, if a site was developed for New York users primarily AND it was hosted on a server physically located within New York (IP address) then it would rank better in New York ... that is, given all other SEO ranking factors were equal?   Is this true?

My worry is that once a site is served via CloudFlare via their 64 global cached locations, then do the search engines effectively lose all context as to its origin hosting and therefore hosting in New York (in the example above) would have no different effect than if the site was hosted on Mars (after the site had been cached, that is).

Many thanks,
Mark

Hey thanks Andy,

I have learned a few things regarding the Page Speed Insights and was able to make a few changes regarding expiry times on cache, which increased the score.

I will tweak the suggestions some more to try to get the score to 100/100 for Mobile and Desktop, if that's possible to get 100/100.

Thanks for letting me know about that.

Regards,
Mark

Thanks Andy, sorry I just noticed the settings button where you can pick the international locations, it wasn't obvious to me before.

Whichever page I choose, http://theatrebuddies.us it is taking between 2 and 4 seconds to load, which doesn't seem great?

I am not sure if this is a hosting issue or something to do with javascript on the page which affects load time, it's very hard to say.

I wonder if anyone can recommend a Web host with the fastest possible shared hosting, if that has anything to do with it and I could set up a plan and load one page and do a comparison.

Many thanks again.

• Mark

Hi Andy,

How can I test page load speed if when using the tool above, it does not recognise where I am?   It seem to think I am in a different location globally each time I try.

Thanks so much,

Mark

P.S.  All 148 of my sites are hosted in the US.   I guess the reason I am asking is that it has been hideously time-consuming setting up all these sites that to break them up into all sorts of locally-based hosting plans would take me weeks of fiddling, down-time etc. which I've already gone though earlier this year.   I moved things via CloudFlare because some sites were hacked so it sent me down a wormhole of trying to learn Web security and put best practices in place.   So it's not like I have one site to move somewhere ... any answer may have huge implications in terms of the effort required to put best practices in place for all my sites.   Many thanks again!

Hi Josh,
Thank you very much for your kind assistance!  Makes sense.
I posted a reply to another response above, where I guess I fleshed out my concerns perhaps a bit better (sorry it's a very confusing thing for me to sort out here).   I would be very interested and grateful to hear your comments on it.
Have a great day.
Mark

Hi Andy,
Thanks so much for that.

It is really hard for me to tell what the user's experience is since I am in Australia and users are in 7 other countries and I am not sure how to determine the UX of a person in another city.

To me it seems the sites are serving fast enough even for me here; but since the Web is so hyper-competitive, I am just trying to fine tune in every conceivable area as much as possible, with the belief that lots of little things added up is a good thing, even if they are not the top 3 determining factors of ranking but still important.

In some cases, certain sites only allow users to join if they are within a particular city so the site is totally city-specific.  In this case it may make sense to not use CloudFlare but just buy hosting within that city with that city's IP address.   Would that be true?   It seems to me that a site for people in a certain city only would get better rankings if it's server's IP address was within the same city?
CloudFlare does have a server in this city as well.

I have experienced seeing some subdomains serving so slowly through CloudFare that a warning page comes up that it could not be served (page fail) ... yet with CF suppressed, the pages serve fine, so this is a concern, but maybe it was a random instance I'm not really sure.

Thing is, because of the protection of CloudFlare it feels better to have it in place(?)

My main concern is also centred around the idea that if content is cached and distributed over dozens of servers on a CDN ... and we do a "Who's hosting" the domain and it says 'CloudFlare' then for SEO purposes in terms of serving the most relevant content to people in their local area, then how does the IP address of the hosting affect ranking within a local area?   In other words, if some content is cached (e.g. images) and served via CF and the rest of the content is HTML and not cached and served from the origin server ... in effect, 'where is the home of the site' i.e. if the site is hosted in the UK because most of its customer base is in the UK (but also in other countries) then how do rankings for keywords work in the UK compared to other countries?   I would think without CF the site would appear more UK-specific and UK-centric; but with CF in place ... the context of the hosting is totally lost / confused?

Many thanks for your assistance.

Best regards,
Mark

Will using a CDN like CloudFlare.com confuse search engines in terms of the location (IP address) of where the site is actually physically hosted especially since CloudFlare distributes the site's content all around the globe?

I understand it is important that if customers are mostly in a particular city it makes sense to host on an IP address in the same city for better rankings, all things else being equal?

I have a number of city-based sites but does it make having multiple hosting plans in multiple cities/ countries (to be close to customers) become suddenly a ridiculous thing with a CDN?  In other words should I just reduce it down to having one hosting plan anywhere and just use the CDN to distribute it?

I am really struggling with this concept trying to understand if I should consolidate all my hosting plans under one, or if I should get rid of CloudFlare entirely (can it cause latency in come cases) and create even more locally-based hosting plans (like under site5.com who allow many city hosting plans).

I really hope you can help me somehow or point me to an expert who can clarify this confusing conundrum. Of course my overall goal is to have:
1. lowest page load times
2. best UX
3. best rankings

I do realise that other concepts are more important for rankings (great content, and links etc.) but assuming that is already in place and every other factor is equal, how can I fine tune the hosting to achieve the desirable goals above?

Many thanks!
Mark