Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Does the Location of my Server effect my SEO?
-
Does the geographic Location of my Server effect my SEO?
HELP US! We are arguing for 3 weeks already.
- My partner has mentioned multiple times in the past that "since 2013 google does not require your server to be in the country you are targeting for seo"
And that actually all they care about is if its a good and fast server - not where its physically located in the world. - I am a strong believer that the geographic location of your server directly effects your SEO ranking... lets say if you want to target www.google.ru for your seo, best you have a server located in Russia for hosting your website..
WHO IS RIGHT? Choose the winner and base the facts.
If anybody has the correct answer and information to base it on it will help us alot - and maybe even spare some unnecessary violent between us two! we found some articles across the web, sadly they are all dated back to 2012....Thanks in Advance for all the help guys!
- My partner has mentioned multiple times in the past that "since 2013 google does not require your server to be in the country you are targeting for seo"
-
Good follow up question and I probably should have mentioned it even if GWMT did not. Yes, if you are a local business use that Schema. If you are an organization use that schema. It will help with your geo targeting.
Best
-
Thank you for your quick and informative answer Robert
Would you recommend also inserting Schema tags to help geo localization? is there more ways that I can increase my "relevancy" to the location I would like to target for SEO?And i guess i knew this was coming... one bottle of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokaji to my wise partner..
Thanks Robert.
-
It is really quite a simple answer. In WMT, Google gives you the answers for targeting a specific country. Frankly, Google did not require your server to be in the country you were targeting in 2012... Remember, Google is not saying any of these is the end all or be all of geo targeting. They state clearly each is a signal and each signal has a given weight.
The first indicator if you base it off of what Google says (and your question seems to be anchored by the search behemoth)... ccTLD is the first indicator they mention. Google further states it is a STRONG signal. Next is geo targeting. The fact that there is an option to tell them where you want to target and that it is second would seem to indicate that server location was less relevant than you waving a flag and screaming: Hey Google! Hook me up in Russia please!
The third (But not last) signal is... server location, but they are very clear about this being not as strong a signal when they state, "Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal."And, finally, there are other on page signals that Google can use to determine where you are targeting like phone and addresses on the pages, language, etc. (If your server is in the US, your site is a generic TLD, you have not geo targeted in WMT, and the entire site is written in Urdu, it is likely not going to rank well in Lithuania, but would have the ability to rank in Pakistan or Bangladesh).
Now the winner is ... sorry, YOUR PARTNER. Please by him a nice 5 button, 2000 vintage, Tokaji as a compliment to his SEO prowess...this time.
Best,
Robert
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
-
What's your proudest accomplishment in regards to SEO?
After many years in the industry, you come to realize a few things. One of of the biggest pain points for us at web daytona was being able to give clients a quick keyword ranking cost estimation. After multiple trial and error and relying on API data from one of the most reliable SEO softwares in our industry, we were able to develop an SEO tool that allows us to quickly and accurately get the estimated cost for a given keyword (s) using multiple variables. Most agencies can relate to that story. It’s something my colleagues and I at Web Daytona have been through before. Finding the cost and amount of time needed to rank for a keyword is a time consuming process. That’s why it’s a common practice to sell SEO packages of 5-10 keywords for about $1000-2000 / month. The problem is not all keywords are equally valuable, and most clients know this. We constantly get questions from clients asking: “how much to rank for this specific keyword?” It’s difficult to answer that question with a pricing model that treats the cost of ranking every keyword equally. So is the answer to spend a lot more time doing tedious in-depth keyword research? If we did we could give our clients more precise estimates. But being that a decent proposal can take as long as 2-5 hours to make, and agency life isn’t exactly full of free time, that wouldn’t be ideal. That’s when we asked a question. What if we could automate the research needed to find the cost of ranking keywords? We looked around for a tool that did, but we couldn’t find it. Then we decided to make it ourselves. It wasn’t going to be easy. But after running an SEO agency for over a decade, we knew we had the expertise to create a tool that wouldn’t just be fast and reliable, it would also be precise. Fast forward to today and we’re proud to announce that The Keyword Cost Estimator is finally done. Now we’re releasing it to the public so other agencies and businesses can use it too. You can see it for yourself here. Keyword-Rank-Cost-Ectimator-Tool-by-Web-Daytona-Agency.png
Local Website Optimization | | WebDaytona0 -
More pages on website better for SEO?
Hi all, Is creating more pages better for SEO? Of course the pages being valuable content. Is this because you want the user to spend as much time as possible on your site. A lot of my competitors websites seem to have more pages than mine and their domain authorities are higher, for example the services we provide are all on one page and for my competitors each services as its own page. Kind Regards, Aqib
Local Website Optimization | | SMCCoachHire0 -
How many SEO clients do you handle?
I work in a small web & design agency who started offering SEO 2 yrs ago as it made sense due to them building websites. There have been 2 previous people to me and I now work there 3 days a week and they also have a junior who knew nothing before she started working for us. She mainly works for me. My question is, how many clients do you think would be reasonable to work on? We currently have around 55 and I have been working there for nearly 5 months now and haven't even got to half of the sites to do some work on. I've told them the client list is way too big and we should only have around 15 clients max. However they don't want to lose the money from the already paying clients so won't get rid of any and keep adding new ones Their systems were a mess and had no reporting or useful software so I had to investiagte and deploy that, along with project management software. Their analytics is also a mess and have employed a contractor to help sort that out too. It's like they were offering SEO services but had no idea or structure to what they did. Meta descriptions were cherry picked which ones to be done, so say 50/60 on a site not filled in. So it's not like I have 45 or so well maintained accounts. They're all a mess. Then the latest 10 new ones are all new sites so All need a lot of work. I'm starting to feel incredibly overwhelmed and oppressed by it all and wanted to see what other SEO professionals thought about it. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Local Website Optimization | | hanamck0 -
Impact of .us vs .com on SEO rankings?
Our website is hosted on www.discovered.us. I have 2 questions: 1: we have had regular feedback a .us domain is negative in SEO and in conversion (customers don't like it). We are thinking of changing domain to: www.dscvrd.com.
Local Website Optimization | | Discovered
Any insights on the impact on our rankings (if any) if we do this? 2: we are focusing our SEO global / USA first but conversions in UK are better. We currently do not have multi-language SEO setup. What would the impact be of implementing www.discovered.co.uk on SEO in UK? Thanks! Gijsbert0 -
Which is the best, ".xx" or ".com.xx" in general and for SEO?
Hi, I'm working for a digital marketing agency and have traffic from different countries. We are planning to make different websites for each country. What is the best SEO practice to choose the domain between ".xx" or ".com.xx" from Spain, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru?
Local Website Optimization | | NachoRetta
I think that the ccTLD is better always, for example ".es" better than ".com.es"0 -
Local SEO for National Brands
Hi all, When it comes to local SEO in 2015, I appreciate that having a physical location in the town/city you wish to rank is a major factor. However, if you're a national brand is it still possible to rank for local searches when you're based in one location? The reason I ask is that, although our service is national, the nature of what we offer means that it is not inconceivable that people would search for a local variation of our top keywords. Other than the standard things - location in the content, the H1/H2s, title tag, meta description, url etc. - is there anything national businesses can do to help? Thanks in advance. John
Local Website Optimization | | NAHL-14300 -
Image URLs changed 3 times after using a CDN - How to Handle for SEO?
Hi Mozzers,
Local Website Optimization | | emerald
Hoping for your advice on how to handle the SEO effects an image URL change, that changed 3 times, during the course of setting up a CDN over a month period, as follows: (URL 1) - Original image URL before CDN:www.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 2) - First CDN URL (without CNAME alias - using WPEngine & their own CDN):
username.net-dns.com/images/abc.jpg (URL 3) - Second CDN URL (with CNAME alias - applied 3 weeks later):
cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg When we changed to URL 2, our image rankings in the Moz Tool Pro Rankings dropped from 80% to 5% (the one with the little photo icons). So my questions for recovery are: Do I need to add a 301 redirect/Canonical tag from the old image URL 1 & 2 to URL 3 or something else? Do I need to change my image sitemap to use cdn.mydomain.com/images/abc.jpg instead of www.? Thanks in advance for your advice.0 -
Yoast Local SEO Reviews/Would it work for me?
Hi everyone, I'm looking for some feedback on Yoast Local SEO, and if you think it'd work for our site. www.kempruge.com. Our site is a wordpress site, and there's nothing about it, off the top of my head, that makes me think it wouldn't work, but I've been wrong before. We do use All-In-One SEO, not the Yoast plugin, so I'm not sure if that's compatible.or would cause a problem? (The reason we use All-In-One and not Yoast is because that's what we had when I got here, and I'm worried what would happen if we switched). Also, we have three offices, and I need to be able to do local seo for all three. I know Yoast says it supports multiple offices, but I'd feel more comfortable if someone on here let me know from his/her experience that it did. Anything else you want to add about Yoast Local, I'm all ears! Thanks, Ruben
Local Website Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup0