IP Address of Server an SEO Factor??
-
Hello all,
Interested to hear your thoughts on this.
-
What's best practice re server IP location. Is it OK for that to be in the US if your company is in Europe?
-
Any potential issues?
John Mueller says server location is irrelevant, but some developer I work with thinks IP address of the server is a factor. I can't see how it would be in this day and age.
https://www.seroundtable.com/seo-geo-location-server-google-17468.html
Many thanks,
Gill.
-
-
Thank you both very much for your comments. Very useful! Cheers.
-
This section, from the post you shared, really does sum it up nicely:
"
Is the server location important for geotargeting?
A: If you can use one of the other means to set geotargeting (ccTLD or Webmaster Tools’ geotargeting tool), you don’t need worry about the server’s location. We do, however, recommend making sure that your website is hosted in a way that will give your users fast access to it (which is often done by choosing hosting near your users).But overall, it is nice to see such a strong word used by John, as "many cases it's irrelevant."
So if you are not using a ccTLD and you didn't set your geo-details in Webmaster Tools and the language and content on the site don't strongly suggest country bias, then server location is important but you'd have to think, how important..."
If you follow best practice for delivering content to a specific geographic audience, you're really not going to need to worry about server location (providing it meets all of the other requirements).
-
As you say, a very small role (if other factors are not taken into account). If you take what John Mueller says in "many cases it's irrelevant." It really is such a small factor it can be safely ignore - assuming you've got the rest of your site in order.
-
The CDN will cover that. This isn't a bad article to read through: http://wplang.org/hosting-location-geotargeting-seo-cdn/
-
Hi Gill,
The server's location plays a very small role.You definitely don't need to host your website in any specific geographic location.
I'm sharing a similar old thread @ https://moz.com/community/q/does-the-location-of-my-server-effect-my-seo
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Thanks for the info.
So if your audience is a global one - how would you handle where to have the server?
Is there such a thing of using more than one server to have good response speed in more than one location?
-
Server location alone isn't going to be a factor in itself, but the closer the proximity to the target audience, the faster the server's response will be - generally speaking, assuming server specs are the same. So, while server location isn't going to be a factor (in isolation), server response times and the speed of the site is.
Test your site speed using Google's Page Speed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ or GTMetrix: https://gtmetrix.com/
There are a number of methods to speed up the responsiveness of your site, which will be highlighted in the results, from the tests, above.
Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to deliver your page content rapidly, while reducing the load on your server, is one method to improve your page load times. There's also a number of caching and data compression tools available, depending on your website's infrastructure.
As a rule, I generally try to locate a server as near to my target audience as possible, on AWS servers, using a lightweight framework.
I hope that helps.
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
-
Server update to ipv6, SEO consequences
Hi all, I read the article from 2014 on MOZ regarding ipv6.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
https://moz.com/blog/ipv6-cblocks-and-seo Our technical department is about to change our server from ipv4 to ipv6.
Are there any things we have to consider regarding SEO / rankings / duplicate content etc.. with this transition? I hope you have a little spare time to answer this question. Regards,
Tom1 -
Feefo customer reviews for SEO
Hey Guys, I'm not overly techy, but, I need to advise on Feefo integration. I have been reading and it seems that https://support.feefo.com/support/solutions/articles/8000042161-full-integration-javascript-on-page this is the best integration method. Do you guys have any pointers with using Feefo? Are we still good to use intermediaries like this to handle our reviews for us? Thanks in advance for any help. Kay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eLab_London0 -
Redirecting an IP address
Just taken over a new client who recently moved from A.N. other platform to Shopify. I just found reference to their old website IP address and it appears to be not redirecting. Can I simply use something like Traffic Control (Shopify app) to redirect to the new domain?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Zenfolio set up for SEO
We are using zenfolio as a hosted photography/image gallery set up as http://oursite.zenfolio.com We have about 24,000 backlinks to the website however over 22,000 are from zenfolio.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jazavide
Do you see issues with this set up from an organic seo perspective and so many links from one domain pointing back into the main site?
Thanks0 -
Can I Improve Organic Ranking by Restrict Website Access to Specific IP Address or Geo Location?
I am targeting my website in US so need to get high organic ranking in US web search. One of my competitor is restricting website access to specific IP address or Geo location. I have checked multiple categories to know more. What's going on with this restriction and why they make it happen? One of SEO forum is also restricting website access to specific location. I can understand that, it may help them to stop thread spamming with unnecessary Sign Up or Q & A. But, why Lamps Plus have set this? Is there any specific reason? Can I improve my organic ranking? Restriction may help me to save and maintain user statistic in terms of bounce rate, average page views per visit, etc...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit1 -
Changing server today, any SEO implications or advice you may have?
Morning, We're moving our site to a new server today and having never done so before in an SEO capacity, are there any SEO implications, pitfalls, things to watch out for? Advice and comments appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Martin_S0 -
What is the best permalink structure for SEO?
Your feedback here is definitely appreciated, but I'm also doing a public study and would be honored and humbled if you answered the 5 questions in my survey as well. For those who do not wish to participate, I'd appreciate your general feedback on permalink structure best practices based on what Amazon.com and eBay.com have done to their URLs in recent times. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stevewiideman0