Does server location matter?
-
Hi guys,
-
A friend's website is hosted in Germany (showing German IP in Flagfox) but it is a UK-based local business that only serves customers within a small radius covering 3 medium sized UK towns (they sell heavy construction materials for collection only). Should I advise him to change hosting location to the UK? Will this help him rank better for regional keyword searches & Google Places?
-
He has some 'followed' links from UK sites (over 6 months old) that are not being picked up by Majestic, OSE or Webmaster Tools - is this likely to be connected to the server location?
Thanks in advance for any help!
-
-
The main too signals google looks ta are tld and ip number, so hosting in anouther country is a problem, but as stephen has said you can use GWMT to indicate what country you want to rank in, unfortunatly this only helps with google
See matt cutts
-
- Not really a need to change location. Google is aware that sites are often hosted outside of their country, there are a lot of other stronger signals that he can easily give
I assume he has a .co.uk or a .com?
- Set his location in webmaster tools to be UK
- Make sure he has a UK address on the site - footers or contact us page etc
- Set the lang in the html to en-gb
- Make sure there is UK related content on the page
- If those links are not showing up, they are likely from very weak domains that wouldn't help him even if they did show up. Go and get decent quality links!
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
-
Does having a sub-domain on a different server affect SEO?
I'm working with a company that has a hard-coded website on the root domain, and then a WordPress blog on a subdomain on a separate server. We're planning on implementing a hub and spoke model for their content, hosting the main hubs on the root domain and the linked articles on the blog. Is having the blog on a different server going to hinder our SEO efforts?
Technical SEO | | KaraParlin0 -
Moving wordpress to it's own server
Our company wants to remove wordpress from our current windows OS server at provider 1 and move it to a new server at provider 2. Godaddy handles our DNS. I would like to have it on the same domain without masking. I would like to make a DNS entry on godaddy so that our current server and our new server can use the same URL (ie sellstuff.com). But I only want the DNS to direct traffic to our current server. The goal here is to have the new server using the same URL as the old server so nothing needs to be masked once traffic is redirected with a 301 rule in the htaccess file. But no traffic outside of the 301 rule will end up going to the new server. I would then like to edit the htaccess file on our current server to redirect to the new servers IP address when someone goes to sellstuff.com/blog. Does this make since and is it possible?
Technical SEO | | larsonElectronics0 -
How are Server side redirects perceived compared to direct links (on a Directory site)
Hi, Im creating some listings for a client on a relevant b2b directory (a good quality directory) I asked if the links are 'followed' or no 'followed' and they said they are 'server side redirects' so no direct links. Does anyone know how these are likely to be perceived by Google ? All BEst Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
HTTP Vary:User-Agent Server or Page Level?
Looking for any insights regarding the usage of the Vary HTTP Header. Mainly around the idea that search engines will not like having a Vary HTTP Header on pages that don't have a mobile version, which means the header will be to be implemented on a page-by-page basis. Additionally, does anyone has experience with the usage of the Vary HTTP Header and CDNs like Akamai?Google still recommends using the header, even though it can present some challenges with CDNs. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | burnseo0 -
Does server (host) location effect local search results?
Hey I was wondering if the location of your server (host) effects your local search engine results?Suppose I have an e-commerce website in the Netherlands and I want to host my website in the USA or UK, does this effect my search engine results in the Netherlands?
Technical SEO | | kevba0 -
Hosting sitemap on another server
I was looking into XML sitemap generators and one that seems to be recommended quite a bit on the forums is the xml-sitemaps.com They have a few versions though. I'll need more than 500 pages indexed, so it is just a case of whether I go for their paid for version and install on our server or go for their pro-sitemaps.com offering. For the pro-sitemaps.com they say: "We host your sitemap files on our server and ping search engines automatically" My question is will this be less effective than my installing it on our server from an SEO perspective because it is no longer on our root domain?
Technical SEO | | design_man0 -
Does the page authority matter if the main domain is A high PR??
Hi Guys, Some advice and help here would be great please! I have a web agency that has been building some links for our website, the web agency have built some links that have a page rank of 7 on the domain itself, but the our link is on the inner pages of that domain.. So I guess what I am asking is does is matter or can it still help if our links are on the inner pages of the hight pr domain and not on the homepage?? Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | GAZ090