International Ranking Factors: Hosting

I think you fine people out there in internet land have waited long enough, so without further ado here is the second installment in the international SEO series. This time we will be looking at hosting and the effect it can have on how search engines identify your site for regional and international rankings.

The Effects of Server Location

Where a website is hosted can play a significant role in your international rankings. If you were speaking to someone in real life and the spoke with an accent, this non-verbal clue may give you an idea of where they were born or where they grew up. Similarly if you are a company based in the UK, your ip address can be a clue to your location. When a search engine spider visits your site will they see pages served from a local server in Leeds, England or will they find that they are coming from a server in Washington, America? Search engines will use this information as a metric for measuring your local and international rankings.

You should be aware that a hosting company’s location is not necessarily the location of their servers. If your host is based in the UK or has a .co.uk web address they may still serve your site from servers anywhere in the world. If you currently have hosting or are looking at prospective companies it is worth contacting them to see exactly where your website will reside. It may just be a case of asking them to move your files to another of their servers that are based in the desired location. If the company cannot host your site in the country you are targeting then you will most likely need to look for another provider.

If you are online already then you might want to check where your site is being hosted. There are numerous tools online that can assist you in this task like Canvas Dreams Web Host Locator and 4DNSTools which can check your URL and give you a wealth of information.

What Other Options Do You Have?

If you absolutely cannot host your site in the country you wish to target then there are some things you can do to make sure Google correctly indexes your site for your geographic target.

As a site owner you should have already have registered your site with Google Webmaster Tools as there are various features there that can help you out from an SEO perspective. There is one specific feature that can help you in this situation and that is the “geographic target” option. You can find this in your webmaster tools account by clicking on site configuration from the options on the left hand side and then choosing settings.

There will be a tick box and a drop down menu that allows you to associate your site to a particular country or location on a per-domain, per-subdomain or per-directory level.

The geographic target tool cannot be used if you have a country specific domain e.g. www.example.de because Google will already assign that domain to the relevant country.

Geographic targeting in Google Webmaster Tools really should only be used as a last resort; if you want to target a specific country you should get a country specific domain and host that domain in the relevant country.