Does Server Location Affect SEO?
April 21st, 2010 by Andrew
Most people will have no idea where in the world the server hosting their website is hosted, but it does have a substantial influence on search engine results. This combined with your domain name suffix (.com, .co.uk, etc), can determine which geographical version of Google your results will best appear in. If you have a generic .com, .org or so on domain that is not country specific like a .co.uk, the server location will be used to determine the location of the website’s business.
A large percentage of hosting companies will purchase the cheapest possible servers, and not care where in the world they are hosted just so they can make the best profit. Because of this, if your business is UK based, but your hosting is based in the US, your results are not going to show up well on Google.co.uk. Remember that most of your searchers will be using Google.co.uk rather than Google.com or other international version, so you need to do your best to target them.
Something else to consider about server location is the load speed of your website. A US based server for mainly UK visitors is going to take much longer to load than if it were hosted in the UK. Google Caffeine now takes load speed into consideration when displaying results, so this is just one more reason choosing hosting in the country your website is aimed at is important.
So, when buying a server or hosting, you should think about server location before anything else. If you don’t, you may be wasting your SEO efforts on a website that can never reach its full potential. If you have hosting already, check where it is based. There are plenty of tools out there that can tell you this information, including your hosting company themselves. Moving can be tedious, but once carried out you can be sure you have made the right choice for your SEO strategy.
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This article confuses people and is not entirely true.
Check out the answer to this question: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2e61e49baa5a6eaf
If you have a country specific domain, then you should not worry where you are hosted. A decent US hoster can serve web site much faster than UK one does. So this is not always the case of hosting web sites in the same country where business commences.