IP address geolocation
-
I would classify our site as large (www.covers.com), with our primary target being traffic within the US (about 70%) but I have a feeling we are limited by our IP being located within Canada. I have changed all the targeting to the US in WMT, but could undertake a project to virtually 'move' the site to a US IP, if there would be benefit. I have found articles coming down on both sides of the issue.
Thoughts?
-
Thank you. We did try to have a .uk version of our site, which failed, but there was less of a focus on making that change for SEO reasons. I will keep the country TLD in mind going forward. We are on the verge of some language-specific content so that might be a good time to consider this.
Thanks!
-
Physically hosting your server in a target country does help, but that help is miniscule. In Geotargeting, the largest signals come from your link profile. So if your links come from the US primarily, you should rank better in the US. You also have a genertic TLD instead of a ccTLD, which helps.
Some possible actions to help your site be seen as US would be to do some marketing within the US. Another option is to see if you can get covers.ca and then work on geotargeting that site to Canadians. That would send a strong signal that covers.com is aimed at the US.
-
Some more context: we get a large and disproportionate quantity of traffic from Canada, which generally indicates we are being treated as 'Canadian content'.
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
-
Targeting by IP Address... SEO Issues?
I'm setting up a site to display a different site header graphic depending on which U.S. State the IP address is coming from. In theory we may end up doing 50 different images, although we'll probably start with 4 or 5 and then the other states will get a "default". How will the SE's treat this... if it's just an image change, but the text on the page is the same, will it affect anything? Any best practice advice out there? thanks!
Technical SEO | | JMagary0 -
IP redirects
My website, on a .com domain, displays a different language/content depending on the IP of the user. For example, if someone is browsing my web from Spain, it will show the spanish content, and so on. Does anyone has an idea on how will Google index my pages? Their servers being located in the US, I assume the bot will only crawl and index the english content. How can I tell the bots to do the same for the other languages/content? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Alemoto0 -
How big an impact, if any, does distinct IP subnet have?
I have two customers that sell the same product. Their content is logically similar because they are selling nearly the same thing. The part numbers, descriptions, code base and underlying structure are different however. One customer is complaining that because I host both of these sites in the same server cluster on the same subnet I am negatively affecting their ranking. To what extent might this be true? I've always held that unless the content is identical the subnet thing was just a myth. Any opinions?
Technical SEO | | ChrisInColorado0 -
Name Address Phone NAP For Dentists
I've been working with dentists for a about 6 months but there is something that I feel I need to nail down. When looking at directory listings and trying to standardize a dental practice NAP, many dentists have their company name in many different formats. Here is what I have seen so far. Advanced Dental Care of Chicago
Technical SEO | | Czubmeister
Advanced Dental Care of Chicago - Angela Davidson DDS
Advanced Dental Care of Chicago Drs Davidson, Richardson & Smith
Angela Davidson DDS
Davidson, Richardson & Smith - Advanced Dental Care of Chicago What happens here is that with dentistry, the doctors name is as important as the practice name. Many people hear about a doctor and Google by the doctors name. Others Google the practice name. It almost makes sense to put both the practice name and the doctors name in the Business name but as you can see, the practice name can get real long especially if they have 5 other doctors working there. On top of that, some doctors don't stick around the practice that long so you end up with business listings containing old dental partners. Trying to come to a consensus on the best way to list a dental practice.1 -
Do different hosting IP addresses really matter?
Hi all It used to be (allegedly) the case that you should have all your sites on different Class Cs or Google would hit you with the spam hammer. Which I guess made some sense because back then they probably didn't have many other ways of detecting unnatural link networks. But today with all their data on who is related to who, can this really matter any more? I'd like to move 3 or 4 of our sites (all long-established with widely varied link sources) onto one server, one CMS install, one less headache but I wanted to check first in case I'm about to shoot myself in the foot. Thanks Roger
Technical SEO | | RogerElliott0 -
IPs and Domains
If a domain loads on the domain and the IP is that a problem? So it loads on domain.com and 69.16.....com Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tylerfraser0 -
Multiple Domains, Same IP address, redirecting to preferred domain (301) -site is still indexed under wrong domains
Due to acquisitions over time and the merging of many microsites into one major site, we currently have 20+ TLD's pointing to the same IP address as our "preferred domain:" for our consolidated website http://goo.gl/gH33w. They are all set up as 301 redirects on apache - including both the www and non www versions. When we launched this consolidated website, (April 2010) we accidentally left the settings of our site open to accept any of our domains on the same IP. This was later fixed but unfortunately Google indexed our site under multiple of these URL's (ignoring the redirects) using the same content from our main website but swapping out the domain. We added some additional redirects on apache to redirect these individual pages pages indexed under the wrong domain to the same page under our main domain http://goo.gl/gH33w. This seemed to help resolve the issue and moved hundreds of pages off the index. However, in December of 2010 we made significant changes in our external dns for our ip addresses and now since December, we see pages indexed under these redirecting domains on the rise again. If you do a search query of : site:laboratoryid.com you will see a few hundred examples of pages indexed under the wrong domain. When you click on the link, it does redirect to the same page but under the preferred domain. So the redirect is working and has been confirmed as 301. But for some reason Google continues to crawl our site and index under this incorrect domains. Why is this? Is there a setting we are missing? These domain level and page level redirects should be decreasing the pages being indexed under the wrong domain but it appears it is doing the reverse. All of these old domains currently point to our production IP address where are preferred domain is also pointing. Could this be the issue? None of the pages indexed today are from the old version of these sites. They only seem to be the new content from the new site but not under the preferred domain. Any insight would be much appreciated because we have tried many things without success to get this resolved.
Technical SEO | | sboelter0 -
Why google index my IP URL
hi guys, a question please. if site:112.65.247.14 , you can see google index our website IP address, this could duplicate with our darwinmarketing.com content pages. i am not quite sure why google index my IP pages while index domain pages, i understand this could because of backlink, internal link and etc, but i don't see obvious issues there, also i have submit request to google team to remove ip address index, but seems no luck. Please do you have any other suggestion on this? i was trying to do change of address setting in Google Webmaster Tools, but didn't allow as it said "Restricted to root level domains only", any ideas? Thank you! boson
Technical SEO | | DarwinChinaSEO0