| Website SEO | Geographical location | | Print | |
Geographical location Did you know that the location of your provider’s servers, at the time of writing, can make a big impact on your search engine rankings in local varieties of Google? I cover this in greater detail in the “making the map” section (page 204). However, a short summary now should prove informative. If, for example, you host with 1and1.co.uk (one of the UK’s biggest hosting providers), your servers will actually be based in its German data center. If your TLD (top-level domain) is .com (rather than .co.uk), there is a strong probability that Google will interpret your site as being German based (even if all your contact details on – and links to – the site are UK oriented). If you then go to Google.de and search on “Seiten aus Deutschland” (sites from Germany), your site will perform well in the rankings. However, you will struggle ever to rank well in “Pages from the UK” on Google.co.uk.
On the Netcraft site there is a “What’s that site running” dialogue box, where you can enter a domain name and see, in the results, the country where its IP address is based. Alternatively, try http://whois.domaintools.com/yourdomain.com and see a similarly comprehensive summary from the DomainTools site. If you have determined a shortlist of possible hosting providers but are unclear on where they host their sites, try looking up the location of their corporate websites (as this will normally be in the same place as they host their clients). If this fails, do not be afraid to give the provider a call and ask. Its staff may be unaware of the SEO issues, but it is not unreasonable for them to know where the data center is.
There are other, more practical reasons for hosting in the country where most of your customers live: If you do so, your customers will generally have a shorter hop to your site over the web, so your pages willload more quickly and time out less often.
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